Lord Garnaat said:
T0ad 0f Truth said:
KissingSunlight said:
Would not having laws that discriminate against other people a good thing? If you break down the mentality of such laws, it comes down to "I am afraid of what is unfamiliar to me. So, it must be something we shouldn't allow in society."
What you seem to be advocating is pro-scold
Yeah I expected this to be a bigger topic honestly, but to address the point the part of your post I quoted, you absolutely can't frame it that way. I reject the relativism underlying it and presenting itself as a truer morality.
It's says on the one hand that people have their beliefs, and right or wrong about those beliefs, they're entitled to them, as well as their views, behaviors, and understandings of reality, so long as they don't interfere with other members in society's ability to pursue their own interests, ideas, conceptions and intellectual pursuits. It sees society as nothing more than an arena in which self interest as defined in a very specific hedonistic way is sought after...
"Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection...
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means."
-Alasdair McIntyre
Ethics in this kind of society is governed by rules that support this underlying presupposition. You have your Kantian duties, your Lockean rights, and your Bentham-ian understanding of utility as defined by a global level of pleasure.
All of these ethical systems you would almost certainly be familiar with even if you don't know them by name. They're your inalienable rights of life, liberty, and property, your concepts of "Right is universal and rooted in the nature of the action itself not in the circumstances or results" and your "The ends justify the means as established by the amount, intensity, and duration of pleasure produced in the population."
These enlightenment rule based ethical systems are all very self contained and internally consistent, but all accept a pre-rational premise as their starting point.
No convincing argument is given for why my actions should be universal, focused on the maximization of pleasure, or confined by the need to not step on any natural rights. You either accept the premises given already and act consistently from there or you choose and assert a different premise making any sort of rational ethical conversation between people with different prerational premises impossible.
There's nothing to talk about. You either accept what's valued by me or you don't. People see that and you start to see the relativism of morality seep into the daily conversation.
When I say wishing the a good for a group, I don't mean MY understanding of good. I don't mean MY prerational but consistent premises. I mean to say there are some premises that are not merely valued, but valuable.
I fundamentally reject the idea of a relativistic live and let live philosophy as being the truth. There is good and there is bad, there is right and there is wrong... or there isn't.
To continue pretending that Lockean natural rights have any real rational power behind them defending their existence, and then to use that concept to defend differing interpretations of good as being equally valid is to ignore the problem and cobble together several conflicting ethical theories in an ad hoc and clearly bad way (if there are standards)
And If I'm right in my assessment, then to value those things and to want them for others needs to be spoken. All of it, and with a mind to a rationality behind each "should" that doesn't terminate in a "because."
That objectivity may not actually exist and values truly are fundamentally subjective... which means 1.) I'm wrong, but also that relativism of society is the natural state of things. What isn't the natural state of things is the understanding of that relativistic conflict of ideas as having any SHOULD that holds it together. If ethics are subjective, if they genuinely and truly exist not as a quality of the object being examined, but as a value that exists in the observer then it's not a question of what's valuable. There is no valuable, there is only valued, and you telling me to value appreciation of difference of opinion over appreciation of biological or scientific truth has no weight and cannot have any weight behind it.
If I'm scolding you for your behavior or your philosophy or beliefs do not mistake me. I am not scolding you for breaking any sort of Hobbesian subjective social contract, I'm scolding you for not adhering to an objective standard.
You have to reject that objective standard either by saying it's not a correct assessment of the objectivity of it (To which I will probably react quite negatively to any attempt to salvage the enlightenment project as a feasible alternative), or you have to reject objectivity itself which leaves you just screaming at me about forcing my values on others while doing the same to me by saying I should value respect for other values.
It's a contradiction according to your own standards.
So no, again to answer your question. To argue for standards of behavior is not the same as harassment unless you define harassment to be any criticism of behavior that doesn't meet your subjective minimum standard of not hurting someone... in which case then yes, technically I would support it.
You are at least within my top five of the best amphibians I've encountered, after reading this post. Good show.
The problem that I have with the "live and let live" philosophy is that it rejects claims to objective limits on behavior while simultaneously creating an objective limit on behavior. If you say "Everyone should be allowed to do as they please" but also add the caveat of "Unless it harms people," you are opening yourself up to the obvious question of
why. What is it about harming someone else that changes it? A moment ago you were claiming that right and wrong were subjective, so what if I believe that hurting other people is right? What suddenly gives you the authority to stop me from doing that? Did you not just claim that no such authority exists?
It's a fundamentally impractical position. For all that nihilists talk about there being no objective standard or truth (which is itself asserting an objective truth), that doesn't stop them from constantly making claims as to how things
ought to be, which requires one to acknowledge that something is inherently more desirable than another thing. A breeding ground of hypocrisy.
This is to say nothing of the fact that it also relies on proving "harm" in order to justify anything, which is a word that could literally mean anything. Unless, of course, we are asserted a factual, objective standard of what constitutes harmful and what doesn't, which once against contradicts the principle we are trying to apply in the first place.
I see little value in so-called "tolerance." Either something is true or it isn't, and either something is more right and good than not or it isn't. These "vampires" are either ill people in need of help or imbeciles trying to draw attention to themselves in a typically pathetic, self-absorbed obsession on being unique and special. Toothless and half-formed theorizing won't change that or make it right to assert otherwise.
Objective truth is impossible to define meaningfully though. Because we have only subjective means of measurement, at best, somwthing deemed 'objective' is merely a widespread consensus of what is subjectively held to be true by a large number of people.
Is this reflective of some true underlying objective point? maybe. But it is fundamentally impossible to prove this without making arbitrary leaps in logic and arbitrary assumptions.
As for subjective vs objective morality, do what you want unless it harms others would arise naturally from subjective morality, if you consider one point:
To acknowledge subjectivity AND the existence of other people (eg. Other people are real, and not merely figments of a person's imagination) pretty much leads to this position by default.
If you presume others to exist, but morality to be subjective, it follows that your views are no more or less important than anyone else's. If your personal morals cause harm to others that they do not desire, then you are by definition placing your own moral standards above theirs.
You are violating their morals for the sake of theirs.
This doesn't make 'cause no harm to others' an objective truth, but rather a pragmatic one. Without it, a society consisting of members with entirely subjective morality would collapse.
Something doesn't have to be objectively true to be nessesary.
Anyway, I can just as well state (and it's true, as far as I'm concerned),that I do not like, nor trust anyone claiming objective morality exists.
More often than not these people's own moral standards are full of arbitrary elements, many of which are horrific, and repugnant to me. But above all, claiming things to be objectively true that have little meaningful basis to them just seems like asburd cognitive dissonance.
It's hard enough already to prove the objective truth of scientific theories. (doing so already pre-supposes the existence of a stable, objective reality, even though no person in existence has ever had anything but their subjective senses to work with, and has to assume and infer many things to claim objective reality actually exists)
To then start claiming something as arbitrary as moral standards have some underlying objective truth to them?
Eh. It's absurd. And seems like a kind of delusional thinking, honestly.
Especially so if you still claim there is something objective left after taking into account the purely pragmatic...
Not to mention, what results from people so utterly convinced of the objective truth of their own moral standards is often so disgustingly sick and twisted, that the results are horrifying, to say the least.
So someone has a bunch of delusional, unrealistic beliefs? So what?
If your insistence on 'showing them the error of their ways' basically amounts to a form of torture, (many treatments for 'mental health problems' we've had in the past are dubious as treatment, but make great torture techniques), then I'm sorry, but that's just pathetic.
Truth isn't that important, nor that obvious. What you percieve as true is likely just as delusional as the people you feel inclined to attack. Abusing people in the name of 'truth' is one of the most messed up things I can think of, really.
You don't know the truth. You're just arrogantly shouting at people for not having your exact worldview.
Of course, if you want to interpret my hostile response to your position as contradictory, and evidence that subjective morality is false, that can't be helped I guess.
Subjective doesn't actually mean all positions are equally valid though. It just means there likely isn't any one definitive answer.
Otherwise, you aren't so much arguing about subjective vs objective truth, as you are arguing about the validity of making logical inferences from any given premise. No fundamental premise can ever be proven true anyway, because then it isn't fundamental.
Ehhh. Objective... So much nonsense happens when people lose sight of the actual underpinnings of their reasoning, and delude themselves into thinking there is nothing whatsoever about their position that is arbitrary.
There always is. Mathematics has it's axioms. Science, some basic assumptions about the nature of reality. Other subjects build on all manner of more basic things, or innate (but somewhat arbitrary) traits of people or other living things.
Is it all arbitrary? In practice, hardly. Most of it isn't. But the absolute foundations always are. And what is built on arbitrary foundations is ultimately, still arhitrary no matter how well reasoned and logical all the stuff constructed on top is.
OK. Enough arguing a futile philosophical point for one day.
(yes. subjective perspectives are ultimately not entirely workable in practice. Because true subjectivity means it's impossible to make any kind of judgement about anything. Which is impractical. But practicality is not actually a reflection of whether something is true or not. We treat reality as objective not because we know it is, but because it's the only practical perspective to take for most situations.)
