Well, I would compose that great opera I was thinking of but, for only a 50 year copyright? Forget it. Now if it were 70 years, yeah, I'd totally write it.
What a bunch of baloney.
Please folks, show a little strategy and wait for a greater critical mass of players and discs to be sold before publicly cracking this. I know, I know, everyone wants to be first, but shouldn't we really hold off until the point of no return?
Well, most entities in Quantum Physics have, in fact, multiplied BY necessity. I challenge you to offer more succint solutions, if you're going to go around spewing Occam.
But why should a moral code necessarily be consistent with nature? I understand that the idea of what can be consistent with 'self-preservation' can be very subtle, complex, and often counter-intuitive, but I'm still left with the question of why that should be the basis of morality. This seems to be an arbitrary assertion. Since when does Nature have anything at all to do with morality?
Individual ethics is not 'nihilism'. Nihilism may be a particular person's response to the lack of a more general moral framework, but this is not a universal reaction. I've known many people with 'individual ethics' who had a far more rigid self-imposed moral code than most people who subscribe to the more 'universal' principles which you describe. Also, while I agree that relativism can often lead to very slippery notions of morality, subjectivism can be intensely moral. It just appears somewhat frightening and dangerous to others, but is no less moral for that.
This discussion is logically flawed. Morality is, by definition, baseless. As soon as you discover a utility for an action, then it is no longer a moral action, it is a useful action. A moral choice might coincidentally be useful, but if the choice is made BECAUSE it is useful, then it is not a moral choice.
All these people who want to find an evolutionary basis for morality are not really talking about morality anymore; they are perhaps talking about instinct, a concept which may help to describe genetically based behavior that doesn't always have an immediately obvious selfish motive. Yet the desire seems to be to find the motive. This is not morality.
This idea is frightening to many people, the idea that morality cannot be logically justified. But where is the altruism in committing an act which you can logically justify?
In the end, morality is more about esthetics than anything else. It is about, 'that is not the kind of world I want to live in,' which is an essentially esthetic judgement. And while there are certainly evolutionary underpinnings for our esthetic faculties, the use of them to make moral choices is inherently irrational, which is as it should be.
Don't get me wrong; I believe that we ought to be able to justify our actions as far as possible, but the problem is that this can often paralyze us into inaction if we reach the end of the logical chain of reasoning without finding a sufficiently rational underpinning for our choices. Ironically, once we accept that morality is baseless it can often free us to just go ahead and 'do the right thing'.
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Well, I would compose that great opera I was thinking of but, for only a 50 year copyright? Forget it. Now if it were 70 years, yeah, I'd totally write it. What a bunch of baloney.
http://snurl.com/9ae09 Define "internet" as only those things conforming to the IP standard.
Please folks, show a little strategy and wait for a greater critical mass of players and discs to be sold before publicly cracking this. I know, I know, everyone wants to be first, but shouldn't we really hold off until the point of no return?
Well, most entities in Quantum Physics have, in fact, multiplied BY necessity. I challenge you to offer more succint solutions, if you're going to go around spewing Occam.
But why should a moral code necessarily be consistent with nature? I understand that the idea of what can be consistent with 'self-preservation' can be very subtle, complex, and often counter-intuitive, but I'm still left with the question of why that should be the basis of morality. This seems to be an arbitrary assertion. Since when does Nature have anything at all to do with morality?
Individual ethics is not 'nihilism'. Nihilism may be a particular person's response to the lack of a more general moral framework, but this is not a universal reaction. I've known many people with 'individual ethics' who had a far more rigid self-imposed moral code than most people who subscribe to the more 'universal' principles which you describe. Also, while I agree that relativism can often lead to very slippery notions of morality, subjectivism can be intensely moral. It just appears somewhat frightening and dangerous to others, but is no less moral for that.
This discussion is logically flawed. Morality is, by definition, baseless. As soon as you discover a utility for an action, then it is no longer a moral action, it is a useful action. A moral choice might coincidentally be useful, but if the choice is made BECAUSE it is useful, then it is not a moral choice.
All these people who want to find an evolutionary basis for morality are not really talking about morality anymore; they are perhaps talking about instinct, a concept which may help to describe genetically based behavior that doesn't always have an immediately obvious selfish motive. Yet the desire seems to be to find the motive. This is not morality.
This idea is frightening to many people, the idea that morality cannot be logically justified. But where is the altruism in committing an act which you can logically justify?
In the end, morality is more about esthetics than anything else. It is about, 'that is not the kind of world I want to live in,' which is an essentially esthetic judgement. And while there are certainly evolutionary underpinnings for our esthetic faculties, the use of them to make moral choices is inherently irrational, which is as it should be.
Don't get me wrong; I believe that we ought to be able to justify our actions as far as possible, but the problem is that this can often paralyze us into inaction if we reach the end of the logical chain of reasoning without finding a sufficiently rational underpinning for our choices. Ironically, once we accept that morality is baseless it can often free us to just go ahead and 'do the right thing'.