We casually use the word "exist" in modern English in places where strictly speaking we probably shouldn't, and to avoid obnoxious circumlocutions I let myself do that too
Fair enough.
Where is the number two? Where is the number four? Do numbers "exist"
My main thrust is that something transcendental must exist that allows distinct minds to have a common understanding of what that immaterial thing is. That may be a form, or as Augustine describes it, an idea in the mind of God. There are also people like Russell who tried to reduce mathematics to logic. I find it interesting that he saw numbers as simply characteristics of plurality. The Trinity is both one and many. I could base plurality in God’s attributes. I don’t really know which way to go with it and I don’t accept or reject mathematical Platonism, but I do assert that something transcendental must exist to account for it.
How do you explain logic in your system? How can you account for it being universal? All you have done is attack the need for immaterial universals to exist.
People like you do the same reduction of all propositions to descriptive ones, and then appeal to all kinds of immaterial things existing to avoid that absurdity, just falling into a different one instead
How is it absurd that immaterial things exist? Is it only absurd because you don’t like that idea?
How do you objectively ground descriptive statements?
I don’t think you can in a worldview that rejects God. I have found it quite humorous that recently a number of pop scientists have argued that we are likely living in a simulation. In my worldview I can take a realist approach and ground it in God’s revelation and that he made us in his image. That doesn’t mean that our senses can never be mistaken, however.
The appetite is the seeming-good-or-bad experience. Pain is the quintessential example: pain just can't help but seem bad. In a very fundamental way, painfulness is kind of the essence of badness.
Pain is the quintessential example? Have you heard of masochism? Are you telling masochists they are wrong?
Why should we believe our eyes?
My point is that you seem to be picking something arbitrary based on your subjective feelings.
Not at all, in several ways. One, majoritarianism doesn't matter. Nobody gets to tell anybody else that their appetites are aberrant and don't count; the objective good must account for all appetites, just like the objective truth must account for all observations.
So back to pain. We observe that it seems bad for 99 people. Then there is this one masochist who it seems good to. Can we then never conclude that causing pain to someone is bad because we have an outlier?
Second, this seems to confuse what an appetite is: I can't have an appetite about whether or not it is wrong to murder you, so it's not like it would be possible to even have a unanimous-minus-one consensus of appetites that murdering the one objector is good; appetites aren't desires, or intentions, they're experiences. The most relevant appetites in determining that matter are those of the would-be victim, and the job of the rest in trying to answer the question of whether murdering them is OK would be to consider what it's like to be murdered and it that seems good or bad according to their hypothetical appetites as the hypothetical victim. In more contentious cases you'd want to actually go and experience the thing someone else experiences and see if that feels good or bad to you in those circumstances, but with something like there's experience enough to draw from to make that inference without further testing -- we've all been injured at some point or another, to some extent or anoth
Please hear me again. It is not my goal to win an argument or to tear apart your philosophical system. It is out of a genuine care and concern for you that I make the arguments that I am making. I am just a philosophical tinkerer and you are a true philosopher, but I believe my position has merit. I have been endeavoring to set forth an argument, but it takes some time to work up to. Please forgive me if any of this comes out too strong.
I think ontology is important. To say that something seems good or seems evil implies that goodness or evilness exists. Though moral judgments can be made prescriptively, you have used these terms descriptively through this conversation. If you claim it exists, it is not unreasonable to ask ontological questions. If someone tells me I ought not to murder and I ask why, he will tell me “because it is evil!” I don’t understand what evil or good can possibly be in a system that claims the following:
- Prescriptive statements are not expressions of sentiment - Everything that exists is physical - Things do not have moral properties - Morality can be grounded objectively and universally
What do you mean by good and evil? What I understand good and evil to be seems irrational in your system. How do you objectively ground prescriptive statements? Do good and evil exist or not? To avoid the question tells me there is a contradiction you are avoiding.
I don’t see how your ethical system escapes subjectivism or how it has a basis to make absolute statements about morality. In your work, The Codex Quaerendae, you raise the question “but how can phenomenalism, inherently subjective, be made compatible with objectivism?” The answer you gave and the process you describe here seem insufficient. What makes a certain appetite seem good or bad? How does it not reduce to consensus? Why should we pay attention to flourishing and suffering? Is one better than the other? You even state “never positively affirming one specific model to be the absolute indisputably correct one, but continually and forever narrowing in on a smaller and smaller set of models that might be correct.” This system is not a reasonable basis to make objective claims about morality. At best, an adherent to your system could say “according to how the majority of people’s appetites seem, it is probably wrong to murder.” On top of all that it assumes uniformity of nature when your system can’t provide an absolute basis for that either. You have to accept it as an axiom to even begin to use your system.
In The Codex Quaerendae, you state the following: “But that does not mean that no justification can be offered, and that we are doomed forever to either complete skepticism or, ultimately, blind faith. It means only that any fundamental justification must be an extra-logical one — a justification based not on appeal to logic per se but on appeal to something else beyond logic — and I propose a pragmatic justification; that is, a justification appealing to practical concerns.”
I believe that a consistent materialist worldview does reduce to skepticism. You attempt to avoid that by appealing to pragmatism and you feel free to take axioms such as the uniformity of nature because “to do otherwise is simply to give up on even trying to answer questions about what is real, which in turn would guarantee that we will never find any answers.” And so you end up in what seems more like blind faith because you don’t want to be a skeptic.
There is another option. In my worldview, there is an absolute basis for morality. In my worldview, I can say absolutely that the future will be like the past because God “upholds the universe by the words of his power (Heb 1:3).” Consider also logic itself. How can it be accounted for in a materialistic worldview? It is immaterial and universal. In your system, it suffers the same ontological prob
I apologize for the delayed response. Yesterday was really busy and this has taken me some time to think through and answer.
If God is all-powerful then he could have made a universe full of people who are not sinners. He chose to, at the very least, allow sin to randomly come into the world, if it wasn't deliberately part of his plan. If he's all-powerful, then everything that happens, including people sinning, happens either because he wanted it to, or because he rolled a metaphorical die, shrugged and said "ok, I'll allow it".
Free will theodicies of course argue that free will is such a good thing that it would be worse to deny it than to allow its consequence, namely (they argue) the possibility of sin randomly (i.e. by nondeterministic so-called "free will") coming into the world. IIRC you've already said you reject such free-will theodicies (can I assume you're probably a Calvinist?), but even if not: those fail because they misconstrue what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so even if free will is an overriding good that could justify allowing the horrors that exist in the world if those were a necessary concession to it, they're not; if there were an all-powerful God, he could have made a universe full of free-willed people who were born as perfect saints and would never choose to sin, even though they could choose to sin if they had any reason to want to do so, which they wouldn't.
Yes, I do consider myself a Calvinist, so you need not attack this conception of free will.
Creating known-defective living creatures and then letting them suffer from their defects or worse still, actively punishing them instead of just fixing them, is not the act of an all-good, all-powerful being.
Previously, you stated
Yeah, sure, maybe there might conceivably be some good reason to allow some evil, but is it likely that there's good enough reason to allow this much evil?
These two statements are at odds. If the second statement you made is true then the first is false. When I gave you an answer to the second you went back to the first. Since the second still stands I will reiterate my point since you skipped it. God is just. Suffering and death are a penalty for sin. Is a judge just when he allows the murderer and rapist go free? There is none that is righteous. So to argue that a good God is unlikely to exist because unrighteous sinners suffer or die is to argue that God can not act according to his just character and still be just. The quantity of evil is simply irrelevant. Nobody is receiving injustice.
How do you know what God is like, what he wants, or what he says is moral, and how do you reconcile what you think you know in that regard with people of other religions who think they know that God is/wants/says something different? How is your religion not just as "arbitrarily" chosen as any non-religious ethical system? People, including religious people, have to pick, somehow, for whatever reasons, what they think is the right way to tell good from bad. None of them think their choice is arbitrary -- they all have their reasons -- and all of them think they've got the right answer, even though others disagree. Anyone who's not a moral nihilist will agree that at least one of them might have the right answer, even though others disagree.
The Christian knows simply because God reveals things about himself. I do see logical arguments for his attributes from philosophy, but ultimately I go to scripture. That of course brings the question: how do I know Christianity is the correct religion? Consider the following passage:
Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up, and shall be exalted. 14As many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind— 15so shall he sprinkle
I will get back to you as soon as I can. It probably won't be until late tonight. I have to head off to work early today and this one requires a bit more time for a response than I gave myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
We casually use the word "exist" in modern English in places where strictly speaking we probably shouldn't, and to avoid obnoxious circumlocutions I let myself do that too
Fair enough.
Where is the number two? Where is the number four? Do numbers "exist"
My main thrust is that something transcendental must exist that allows distinct minds to have a common understanding of what that immaterial thing is. That may be a form, or as Augustine describes it, an idea in the mind of God. There are also people like Russell who tried to reduce mathematics to logic. I find it interesting that he saw numbers as simply characteristics of plurality. The Trinity is both one and many. I could base plurality in God’s attributes. I don’t really know which way to go with it and I don’t accept or reject mathematical Platonism, but I do assert that something transcendental must exist to account for it.
How do you explain logic in your system? How can you account for it being universal? All you have done is attack the need for immaterial universals to exist.
People like you do the same reduction of all propositions to descriptive ones, and then appeal to all kinds of immaterial things existing to avoid that absurdity, just falling into a different one instead
How is it absurd that immaterial things exist? Is it only absurd because you don’t like that idea?
How do you objectively ground descriptive statements?
I don’t think you can in a worldview that rejects God. I have found it quite humorous that recently a number of pop scientists have argued that we are likely living in a simulation. In my worldview I can take a realist approach and ground it in God’s revelation and that he made us in his image. That doesn’t mean that our senses can never be mistaken, however.
The appetite is the seeming-good-or-bad experience. Pain is the quintessential example: pain just can't help but seem bad. In a very fundamental way, painfulness is kind of the essence of badness.
Pain is the quintessential example? Have you heard of masochism? Are you telling masochists they are wrong?
Why should we believe our eyes?
My point is that you seem to be picking something arbitrary based on your subjective feelings.
Not at all, in several ways. One, majoritarianism doesn't matter. Nobody gets to tell anybody else that their appetites are aberrant and don't count; the objective good must account for all appetites, just like the objective truth must account for all observations.
So back to pain. We observe that it seems bad for 99 people. Then there is this one masochist who it seems good to. Can we then never conclude that causing pain to someone is bad because we have an outlier?
Second, this seems to confuse what an appetite is: I can't have an appetite about whether or not it is wrong to murder you, so it's not like it would be possible to even have a unanimous-minus-one consensus of appetites that murdering the one objector is good; appetites aren't desires, or intentions, they're experiences. The most relevant appetites in determining that matter are those of the would-be victim, and the job of the rest in trying to answer the question of whether murdering them is OK would be to consider what it's like to be murdered and it that seems good or bad according to their hypothetical appetites as the hypothetical victim. In more contentious cases you'd want to actually go and experience the thing someone else experiences and see if that feels good or bad to you in those circumstances, but with something like there's experience enough to draw from to make that inference without further testing -- we've all been injured at some point or another, to some extent or anoth
Please hear me again. It is not my goal to win an argument or to tear apart your philosophical system. It is out of a genuine care and concern for you that I make the arguments that I am making. I am just a philosophical tinkerer and you are a true philosopher, but I believe my position has merit. I have been endeavoring to set forth an argument, but it takes some time to work up to. Please forgive me if any of this comes out too strong.
I think ontology is important. To say that something seems good or seems evil implies that goodness or evilness exists. Though moral judgments can be made prescriptively, you have used these terms descriptively through this conversation. If you claim it exists, it is not unreasonable to ask ontological questions. If someone tells me I ought not to murder and I ask why, he will tell me “because it is evil!” I don’t understand what evil or good can possibly be in a system that claims the following:
- Prescriptive statements are not expressions of sentiment
- Everything that exists is physical
- Things do not have moral properties
- Morality can be grounded objectively and universally
What do you mean by good and evil? What I understand good and evil to be seems irrational in your system. How do you objectively ground prescriptive statements? Do good and evil exist or not? To avoid the question tells me there is a contradiction you are avoiding.
I don’t see how your ethical system escapes subjectivism or how it has a basis to make absolute statements about morality. In your work, The Codex Quaerendae, you raise the question “but how can phenomenalism, inherently subjective, be made compatible with objectivism?” The answer you gave and the process you describe here seem insufficient. What makes a certain appetite seem good or bad? How does it not reduce to consensus? Why should we pay attention to flourishing and suffering? Is one better than the other? You even state “never positively affirming one specific model to be the absolute indisputably correct one, but continually and forever narrowing in on a smaller and smaller set of models that might be correct.” This system is not a reasonable basis to make objective claims about morality. At best, an adherent to your system could say “according to how the majority of people’s appetites seem, it is probably wrong to murder.” On top of all that it assumes uniformity of nature when your system can’t provide an absolute basis for that either. You have to accept it as an axiom to even begin to use your system.
In The Codex Quaerendae, you state the following: “But that does not mean that no justification can be offered, and that we are doomed forever to either complete skepticism or, ultimately, blind faith. It means only that any fundamental justification must be an extra-logical one — a justification based not on appeal to logic per se but on appeal to something else beyond logic — and I propose a pragmatic justification; that is, a justification appealing to practical concerns.”
I believe that a consistent materialist worldview does reduce to skepticism. You attempt to avoid that by appealing to pragmatism and you feel free to take axioms such as the uniformity of nature because “to do otherwise is simply to give up on even trying to answer questions about what is real, which in turn would guarantee that we will never find any answers.” And so you end up in what seems more like blind faith because you don’t want to be a skeptic.
There is another option. In my worldview, there is an absolute basis for morality. In my worldview, I can say absolutely that the future will be like the past because God “upholds the universe by the words of his power (Heb 1:3).” Consider also logic itself. How can it be accounted for in a materialistic worldview? It is immaterial and universal. In your system, it suffers the same ontological prob
I apologize for the delayed response. Yesterday was really busy and this has taken me some time to think through and answer.
If God is all-powerful then he could have made a universe full of people who are not sinners. He chose to, at the very least, allow sin to randomly come into the world, if it wasn't deliberately part of his plan. If he's all-powerful, then everything that happens, including people sinning, happens either because he wanted it to, or because he rolled a metaphorical die, shrugged and said "ok, I'll allow it".
Free will theodicies of course argue that free will is such a good thing that it would be worse to deny it than to allow its consequence, namely (they argue) the possibility of sin randomly (i.e. by nondeterministic so-called "free will") coming into the world. IIRC you've already said you reject such free-will theodicies (can I assume you're probably a Calvinist?), but even if not: those fail because they misconstrue what free will even is (randomness is not freedom), and so even if free will is an overriding good that could justify allowing the horrors that exist in the world if those were a necessary concession to it, they're not; if there were an all-powerful God, he could have made a universe full of free-willed people who were born as perfect saints and would never choose to sin, even though they could choose to sin if they had any reason to want to do so, which they wouldn't.
Yes, I do consider myself a Calvinist, so you need not attack this conception of free will.
Creating known-defective living creatures and then letting them suffer from their defects or worse still, actively punishing them instead of just fixing them, is not the act of an all-good, all-powerful being.
Previously, you stated
Yeah, sure, maybe there might conceivably be some good reason to allow some evil, but is it likely that there's good enough reason to allow this much evil?
These two statements are at odds. If the second statement you made is true then the first is false. When I gave you an answer to the second you went back to the first. Since the second still stands I will reiterate my point since you skipped it. God is just. Suffering and death are a penalty for sin. Is a judge just when he allows the murderer and rapist go free? There is none that is righteous. So to argue that a good God is unlikely to exist because unrighteous sinners suffer or die is to argue that God can not act according to his just character and still be just. The quantity of evil is simply irrelevant. Nobody is receiving injustice.
How do you know what God is like, what he wants, or what he says is moral, and how do you reconcile what you think you know in that regard with people of other religions who think they know that God is/wants/says something different? How is your religion not just as "arbitrarily" chosen as any non-religious ethical system? People, including religious people, have to pick, somehow, for whatever reasons, what they think is the right way to tell good from bad. None of them think their choice is arbitrary -- they all have their reasons -- and all of them think they've got the right answer, even though others disagree. Anyone who's not a moral nihilist will agree that at least one of them might have the right answer, even though others disagree.
The Christian knows simply because God reveals things about himself. I do see logical arguments for his attributes from philosophy, but ultimately I go to scripture. That of course brings the question: how do I know Christianity is the correct religion?
Consider the following passage:
Behold, my servant shall act wisely;
he shall be high and lifted up,
and shall be exalted.
14As many were astonished at you—
his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance,
and his form beyond that of the children of mankind—
15so shall he sprinkle
I will get back to you as soon as I can. It probably won't be until late tonight. I have to head off to work early today and this one requires a bit more time for a response than I gave myself.
I find your point regarding time quite interesting and it is new to me, I don't personally hold to the privation theory of evil, however.
New account. Original AC.