An entirely different look at human morality and ethics.

[Zero_Sum]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation.

[Meno_]

https://youtu.be/-sRjTlBRQUw

[Zero_Sum]

https://youtu.be/-sRjTlBRQUw

Chance isn't good enough when only small numbers are benefiting where large numbers of everybody else is left as fodder for the gears of industrial technological society. Eventually everybody being sacrificed to lives of complete punury have to organize amongst themselves to take on that small segment of society and if they don't listen they need to be quickly executed in a public manner until they come to the realization that a majority of people's lives are not sacrificial. I believe in a strong moral and ethical philosophy for society that justifies such people meeting the fate of death for ruining entire societies. We'll call it a moral and ethical case of their total permanent removal.

[Meno_]

As Freudian economy fails to compensate for the real thing, which is the marketplace, all bets are off, but so far , the yea's abundantly exceed the nay's.

Chances are good , that it will work.

[Zero_Sum]

As Freudian economy fails to compensate for the real thing, which is the marketplace, all bets are off, but so far , the yea's abundantly exceed the navy's.

Chances are good , that it will work.

What will work exactly? Please speak your mind and I insist you hold nothing back for the sake of conversation.

[Meno_]

As Freudian economy fails to compensate for the real thing, which is the marketplace, all bets are off, but so far , the yea's abundantly exceed the navy's.

Chances are good , that it will work.

What will work exactly? Please speak your mind and I insist you hold nothing back for the sake of conversation.

The compensatory processes of what appears as liberal moral/ethical approaches toward social progress.

Compensation is a defensive approach to inordinate opening of primal processes , bearing on ideal/versus real images of self.

The resolution may invite a reductive simplification, but such may not make much sense, as far as being socially and politically relevant.

[Zero_Sum]

As Freudian economy fails to compensate for the real thing, which is the marketplace, all bets are off, but so far , the yea's abundantly exceed the navy's.

Chances are good , that it will work.

What will work exactly? Please speak your mind and I insist you hold nothing back for the sake of conversation.

The compensatory processes of what appears as liberal moral/ethical approaches toward social progress.

Compensation is a defensive approach to inordinate opening of primal processes , bearing on ideal/versus real images of self.

The resolution may invite a reductive simplification, but such may not make much sense, as far as being socially and politically relevant.

Too bad for you that I reject classical liberalism along with its modern neo-liberal and neo-conservative manifestations. I'm of the dark enlightenment meaning the past is where to find the answers as this modern experiment is on its last knees dying getting ready to collapse in on itself.

Modern democracies and republics from my point of view are on the verge of completely dying to a whole host of internal problems that no level of reform will cure especially since there is no public will to do so, what comes next will be interesting indeed.

[Meno_]

As I agree with You in part, the liberal agenda is further necessitated by the reactive consensus of reverse imperialistic social justice, irrespective of inbred Euro-phenominal ( English-French) concentrative -conservative throw backs.

Although I totally go along with the relative sense of overbearing qualifications, quantification does not bear to such realizations.

The future belongs to the masses, informed, or, uninformed, capitalized upon or not.

Later, perhaps tomorrow. See You, Joker.

[Zero_Sum]

As I agree with You in part, the liberal agenda is further necessitated by the reactive consensus of reverse imperialistic social justice, irrespective of inbred Euro-phenominal ( English-French) concentrative -conservative throw backs.

Although I totally go along with the relative sense of overbearing qualifications, quantification does not bear to such realizations.

The future belongs to the masses, informed, or, uninformed, capitalized upon or not.

Later, perhaps tomorrow. See You, Joker.

Very well, goodnight. I look forward to future extrapolations from you on this issue. Don't disappoint me!

[Zero_Sum]

The origins of morality and ethics doesn't matter, the only thing that matters is the practical purpose of maintaining social order which is why despite the cloudy obscure origins of human morality it persists even in its imperfect form because a world without some kind of human moral or ethical intervention by the state would quickly become hell on earth as human beings would devour each other until not a single human being would be left on this earth. Human beings would very quickly self cannibalize each other.

Human beings are naturally amoral which is why it was necessary to create morals and ethics to begin with historically in order to restrain that amoral instinctual primitive behavioral impulse. Human civilization wouldn't be able to exist without morality, ethics, and a code of law. Because human beings are naturally amoral is the very reason human created morality or ethics will always be imperfect [flawed with errors] to some degree.

That's why morality and ethics is necessary where it becomes equally necessary to rule over human beings with an iron rod to keep themselves from totally destroying each other.

Pragmatism and utilitarianism triumphs over nihilism, that's why nobody takes moral nihilists seriously.

[Zero_Sum]

Truth is what power makes it to be for truth requires enforcement along with equally enforced perception and the elimination or restraining of all skeptical mental doubts of it by others.

[Zero_Sum]

There are no truths, so we create our own truths but when you create your truth so do other people create their own truths also which becomes a problem overtime concerning legitimate consensus and because of such there is a competition of whose truths gets to be the ultimate truth. The dominant ones establish dominant social orders and out of that what is dominant prevailing truth . So as the dominant one you eliminate those people by civil debate, cultural absorption, religious conversion, war, political persecution, slavery, intimidation, assassination, or even murder and then establish your own created truth as the ultimate truth which then amongst your followers overtime becomes objective.

After several generations it just becomes objective established fact concerning the general historical record.

[Zero_Sum]

All objective truth in the political, social, economic, and cultural sense stems from a barrel of a gun, it becomes truth by eliminating others. Their truths become eliminated in maintaining the legitimacy of your own truth as the ultimate one.

[Zero_Sum]

Whether or not 2+2=4 is irrelevant, if you say 2+2=5 with the enforcement of a gun everybody else overtime will start believing in it as well. Truth is initiated by force just as all human morality, ethics, values, or beliefs are.

[Zero_Sum]

Concerning the divine morals, ethics, or commandments of God a holy man convened with divinity to write them into a code of laws.

Immediately after doing this somebody came out of the audience doubting whether or not he actually convened with God whatsoever, and so the same holy man wrote an exception to the law of 'Thou shall not kill' where the skeptic became permanently silenced afterwards in the name of blasphemy against the divine.

[Silhouette]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation.

This is just another way that Experientialism solves Nihilism and Postmodernism.

By distinguishing truth from utility, it's not a problem to say that it's true that morality and ethics are "an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all", and also to say that "usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization".

What you're saying is perfectly true, but unfortunately it's not "an entirely different look" as I formulated the broader concept behind what you're saying and more into my own Philosophy "Experientialism" many years ago, only first announcing it with this particular name as long as 6 years ago.

The philosophy also resolves statements that formerly seemed to philosophers like paradoxes, such as "The truth is that there is no truth".
So more accurately the seeming paradox resolves and expands to something like "There is utility but it is not truth".
The corrected version retains the meaning of "no truth" in the seemingly paradoxical version, yet it eliminates its apparent internal contradiction by more accurately putting the statement in terms of utility instead of truth.

I'm pretty sure you were around when I was developing Experientialism, so whether you remember it or not you might have picked up on its genius and had it filter into the thought processes that led you to this thread - or maybe you came to the point of this thread entirely independently at a later date, who knows.
So in case you weren't aware of Experientialism, or forgot about it, it distinguishes between Continuous Experience and discrete experiences - the former being "the truth", which is that experience has no gaps of nothingness to separate things, and if there are gaps of somethingness to separate things, there are no gaps of nothingness to separate these gaps of somethingness from the things they separate. As such, experience is fundamentally continuous. However, to speak of experience in any useful way, one needs to abitrarily dissect it into discrete experiences according to what is deemed a useful way. This is the only way to achieve knowledge, however wisdom reminds us that knowledge is necessarily removed from the truth by virtue of it necessarily being in terms of discrete experiences instead of Continuous Experience. Thus utility is not truth, though "truth" is commonly used in lieu of utility in the "relative transitive" sense: that something is true to experience to a certain relative extent - as opposed to ever "being True" in an absolute intransitive (i.e. "True" not "true to") sense.

So as you can see, upon application to morality and ethics, there is no True morality and ethics, but there are better and worse versions of these concepts in terms of their utility, which is your point, yes?
Perhaps you can see the further implications of this philosophy with respect to your latest mention of "God" and any commandments, as you're now speaking about.

[Aware-ness]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation.

I'm down with that. Evolution moves onward. There's elaborate human construct fictions that have proven to be very functional. The International Date Line, and Greenwich meridian come to mind ; and for that matter time zones ; we all use them like they are real. And they are. They get things done. Who cares if they are elaborate human construct fictions. They work.

That's true for social order (and religion) whatever works works. And it could also possibly get better, over time ... let's hope. It's a job only evolution can pull off ... with our help, maybe.

Maybe a social grading system will rein in the disorder in society. Keep on eye on China.

[Zero_Sum]

Because human beings are naturally amoral one wonders if human constructed morals, ethics, or values will always be filled with errors and imperfect. Maybe it will always be such or maybe not.

Because human beings are naturally amoral and self serving filled with pride, ego, folly, or hubris is the very impetus that will ensure that they'll keep trying to perfect the implementation of morals even if it is a futile endeavor to begin with but because human beings revolve around eternal struggle is the very reason why the project will never be abandoned. Time will tell whether eternal struggle or futility will win at human history's twilight.

[Zero_Sum]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation.

This is just another way that Experientialism solves Nihilism and Postmodernism.

By distinguishing truth from utility, it's not a problem to say that it's true that morality and ethics are "an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all", and also to say that "usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization".

What you're saying is perfectly true, but unfortunately it's not "an entirely different look" as I formulated the broader concept behind what you're saying and more into my own Philosophy "Experientialism" many years ago, only first announcing it with this particular name as long as 6 years ago.

The philosophy also resolves statements that formerly seemed to philosophers like paradoxes, such as "The truth is that there is no truth".
So more accurately the seeming paradox resolves and expands to something like "There is utility but it is not truth".
The corrected version retains the meaning of "no truth" in the seemingly paradoxical version, yet it eliminates its apparent internal contradiction by more accurately putting the statement in terms of utility instead of truth.

I'm pretty sure you were around when I was developing Experientialism, so whether you remember it or not you might have picked up on its genius and had it filter into the thought processes that led you to this thread - or maybe you came to the point of this thread entirely independently at a later date, who knows.
So in case you weren't aware of Experientialism, or forgot about it, it distinguishes between Continuous Experience and discrete experiences - the former being "the truth", which is that experience has no gaps of nothingness to separate things, and if there are gaps of somethingness to separate things, there are no gaps of nothingness to separate these gaps of somethingness from the things they separate. As such, experience is fundamentally continuous. However, to speak of experience in any useful way, one needs to abitrarily dissect it into discrete experiences according to what is deemed a useful way. This is the only way to achieve knowledge, however wisdom reminds us that knowledge is necessarily removed from the truth by virtue of it necessarily being in terms of discrete experiences instead of Continuous Experience. Thus utility is not truth, though "truth" is commonly used in lieu of utility in the "relative transitive" sense: that something is true to experience to a certain relative extent - as opposed to ever "being True" in an absolute intransitive (i.e. "True" not "true to") sense.

So as you can see, upon application to morality and ethics, there is no True morality and ethics, but there are better and worse versions of these concepts in terms of their utility, which is your point, yes?
Perhaps you can see the further implications of this philosophy with respect to your latest mention of "God" and any commandments, as you're now speaking about.

Experentialism, never heard of that until now. I will have to take a look into this.

Do you have any links?

[Zero_Sum]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation.

I'm down with that. Evolution moves onward. There's elaborate human construct fictions that have proven to be very functional. The International Date Line, and Greenwich meridian come to mind ; and for that matter time zones ; we all use them like they are real. And they are. They get things done. Who cares if they are elaborate human construct fictions. They work.

That's true for social order (and religion) whatever works works. And it could also possibly get better, over time ... let's hope. It's a job only evolution can pull off ... with our help, maybe.

Maybe a social grading system will rein in the disorder in society. Keep on eye on China.

That's exactly where I'm going with this thread, nihilism lacks insights into pragmatism, utilitarianism, and social expediency which is why nihilists are thoroughly ignored.

Pragmatism, utilitarianism, and social expediency rules the day in every which way always.

[Silhouette]

Experentialism, never heard of that until now. I will have to take a look into this.

Do you have any links?

I'm its creator - ask me anything.

[Zero_Sum]

Experentialism, never heard of that until now. I will have to take a look into this.

Do you have any links?

I'm its creator - ask me anything.

Can you give me a basic definition, theoretical framework, or foundation of it to go on?

[Zero_Sum]

Silhouette, don't dangle that juicy raw meat in front of me without a single reply. I am genuinely curious about seeing your theory on the subject. Don't allow my overall cynicism frighten you away.

I genuinely want to see your elaboration on the subject where we can discuss it even more further. I'm curious to see if we actually agree on some points.

[iambiguous]

The nihilists will say that all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all. They're right in that it is an elaborate fiction human beings have created to establish social order whether it be so called natural rights of man, divine ones endowed by God, or creations by a state.

Just for the record...

Yes, no doubt about it, there are nihilists out there who really do claim that "all of morality and human ethics is an elaborate fiction of make believe where it is a construct signifying nothing at all."

You know, whatever that means!

But this particular nihilist merely suggests that "here and now" it seems reasonable to him that human morality is more rather than less a historical, cultural and experiential construct, intertwined in an enormously complex interaction of genes and memes evolving existentially over time out in a particular world bursting at the seams with contingency, chance and change.

Sound familiar? Well, that's because, of late, I haven't come up with a better way to put it.

Morality/ethics is a fiction [in my view] only when it is defined and defended essentially by being anchored to one or another objectivist font: God, Reason, deontology, political ideology, enlightenment, nature etc.

Basically, ethics is just the technical term that serious philosophers have come to assign to the fact that, in any human community, there must be rules of behavior. Why? Because in any human community, wants and needs [either in the form of ends or means] often come into conflict. Brutally at times.

I merely suggest in turn that one way in which to understand these interactions is by way of the manner in which I construe human relationships here in my signature threads. Focusing the beam on the existential interaction between identity, conflicting goods and political power given a particular context.

Which I am always willing to let the objectivists among us choose.

But, instead, by and large, they prefer "general description" "intellectual contraptions" like this:

However despite all of that they're wrong in signifying that it means nothing at all or reducing it to mere trivial human construct because morality and ethics created is very useful in establishing along with creating social order. That usefulness makes it a valuable and instrumental tool in maintaining human civilization. Reducing it to trivial human constructs is pretty meaningless as there are a variety of human constructs or artifices that people take advantage of daily as a given and yet nobody ever asks for their disbanding in total abolishment.

And while morality and ethics might be elaborate fictions or human constructs that doesn't mean there isn't more room for both to evolve overtime into a better organized system of social political implementation

I'm sorry, but...

What On Earth Does This Mean?

Let him choose a context involving well known human behaviors that often come into conflict over value judgments and react to it given the components of his own moral philosophy. Then I will react to that given the components of my own moral philosophy.

Which revolves basically around the distinction I make between what can be known about reality in the either/or world and what [possibly] cannot be known about it in the is/ought world.

And that revolves around the assumption I [and others] make that "in the absence of God, all things are permitted".

[Silhouette]

Silhouette, don't dangle that juicy raw meat in front of me without a single reply. I am genuinely curious about seeing your theory on the subject. Don't allow my overall cynicism frighten you away.

I genuinely want to see your elaboration on the subject where we can discuss it even more further. I'm curious to see if we actually agree on some points.

Calm your nips, I was thinking about the best way to respond to your curiosity. I resolved to add to what I've already said with some applications to various common philosophical concepts and stances:

So in case you weren't aware of Experientialism, or forgot about it, it distinguishes between Continuous Experience and discrete experiences - the former being "the truth", which is that experience has no gaps of nothingness to separate things, and if there are gaps of somethingness to separate things, there are no gaps of nothingness to separate these gaps of somethingness from the things they separate. As such, experience is fundamentally continuous. However, to speak of experience in any useful way, one needs to abitrarily dissect it into discrete experiences according to what is deemed a useful way. This is the only way to achieve knowledge, however wisdom reminds us that knowledge is necessarily removed from the truth by virtue of it necessarily being in terms of discrete experiences instead of Continuous Experience. Thus utility is not truth, though "truth" is commonly used in lieu of utility in the "relative transitive" sense: that something is true to experience to a certain relative extent - as opposed to ever "being True" in an absolute intransitive (i.e. "True" not "true to") sense.

This is the foundation behind the theortical framework of Experientialism, as I typed out and you quoted just before you asked about it...

But I take it that since you're still asking about a definition even after that, you want more.

Any definition I give you will be a reformulation of the above quote:
Experientialism derives the distinction between Truth and utility from the fact that experience has no gaps, and is therefore continuous.
It describes the departure from Continuous Experience (Truth) to discrete experiences (utility) by means of arbitrary insertions of gaps in experience to distinguish concepts and thus relate them back to one another in a way that approximates their origin. It is only in such a way that knowledge can be formed about what presents itself as existence, and without knowledge there is nothing useful to be said about the Truth. Yet with knowledge, Experientialism highlights a fundamental departure from the absolute, necessarily requiring that knowledge about experience is relative and transitive. "There is truth" is tautologous and tells us nothing about truth, for which we require its dissection into something else, reassembled as a means to refer to the Truth. This is the foundation of "meaning" as only relatively true to Truth.
It is in such a way that knowledge is constructed in either better or worse ways, dependent on the nature of how experience is broken down into concepts and how well they are modelled as interacting with one another.

Experientialism is thus a synthesis of Existentialism and Essentialism, in that existence is essence, rather than one preceding the other - as Continuous Experience. The specific nature of the existence or essence of Continuous Experience is that which is subsequently deconstructed and reconstructed from it in terms of discrete experiences: an amalgamation of concepts and conceptual models.
Epistemology is thereby a matter of Pragmatism where truth is an asymptote, towards which the hyperbola of knowledge may approach or depart.
Ontology is a matter of how concepts and conceptual models are formulated, and epistemologically there is no absolutely True or False way to do this, only relatively better or worse ways.
Morality and Ethics are therefore formulations of concepts and conceptual models that describe better or worse ways of achieving certain values according to what values are applied to the process of formulating concepts and conceptual models in the first place.
Experience itself is also a synthesis of Materialism and Idealism. Matter and idea are concepts derived from experience, and based on experience. Matter is an idea and ideas can be reduced to matter circularly ad infinitum. However both require a more fundamental substance to be considered in either way, whereas experience is either there whether you like it or not, or it is not in which case there is no foundation to existence in the first place.
Postmodernism and Nihilism are resolved by this fundamental basis of Continuous Experience, which is either existent, or if it didn't exist there could be nothing said at all about anything in any way. Assuming experience is there, you can say something about its fundamental continuity only in terms of discrete experience, only through this act can Epistemology arise, meaning there is both no objective Epistemology or fundamental Modernist knowledge to found anything, only Continuous Experience, which is not "nothing" even though no knowledge objectively and necessarily arises from it in itself, and it is a basis against which to adjudicate the objective privilege of concepts and conceptual models.