I think you're going to run into insurmountable problems with objectivism. There are some "universal truths" that we seem to be predisposed towards from our evolutionary origins as social primates, but those are really basic, and occasionally include things that at least some of our societies widely consider wrong now on a purely conscious and rational level (e.g. xenophobia and parochial altruism). Other than that, the notion of "good" is cultural, and therefore not universal. How would you deal with that problem?
Our perception of what is real is also predisposed in certain ways from our evolution (and differs in subtle ways between some people, and in major ways between species), includes what we now recognize as errors (e.g. optical illusions), is incomplete, and the processes we evolved to fill in the gaps are biased both personally and culturally. Yet we make use of our senses to determine the truth, and don't doubt that there is an objective truth that even us and a vastly different intelligent alien species could agree about.
The subtle difference in wording in those two sentences is important: senses versus perception. The scientific method has us look past our intuitive interpretation of our senses, look past what we perceive, and pay attention to the specific sensations (or observations) themselves. It is impossible for two observations per se to contradict; only our interpretations of them may contradict, and if we find a set of observations which seem to support one interpretation and other observations which contradict it, we don't say "well I guess reality isn't objective after all", we say "our interpretation is wrong and we need to find a new one which is consistent with all these observations". Sometimes this requires thinking way outside the box and coming up with things that nobody's intuitive perception of the world would agree with, but which nevertheless is what is indicated when you take all the evidence into account -- that's how we end up with things like relativity and quantum mechanics.
Similarly, I think that our normative analogue of the scientific method will have to go past just polling people about what they emotionally desire and trying to meet all those (possibly contradictory) desires. That would be like conducting science by polling people about their (possibly contradictory) intuitive perceptions and somehow trying to reconcile them all together. Instead, in science, we verify every reported observation ourselves, and try to construct models consistent with all of the verified observations, and then try to find any fault we can in every proposed model, and only tentatively move forward with using a model when exhaustive efforts to tear it down have failed. Likewise, I think our normative analogue of science needs to ask not "what do people want" but "what is it like to live as a person in this or that circumstance" -- something like emic* ethnography. Then take all those accounts of what life "feels like" from all these different perspectives and propose a strategy, a plan of action (analogous here to a theory), which would have consequences that alleviate some suffering (analogous to explaining some observation) without causing any other suffering (analogous to predicting something contrary to observation). The second part is very important and is analogous to trying to falsify a theory: before moving ahead with any strategy, try to tear it down by finding someone it would hurt. Not just someone who objects to it -- that'd be like discarding a theory because someone disagreed with it -- but someone it would hurt, as confirmed by such emic ethnography. Only when a strategy would be useful (alleviate some suffering) and has survived thorough attempts to... lets say "vilify" it (by analogy to "falsify")... should we proceed with it; and even then, only tentatively, constantly watchful for consequent harm that might successfully rule it out.
But there is. With physical laws, you verify them by making experiments. The result of every experiment either supports the theory, or it does not, or it's neutral.
When you're doing an experiment on a moral law, what metric of success do you apply to the result? Utilitarian? But many people would say that this metric itself is wrong. On what grounds will you pick one metric over another? That in itself is a moral choice.
That is a philosophical "choice"; or position, at least. But so is the choice to appeal to empirical observations in determining truth. Many (e.g. religious) people reject the scientific method as "just another religion" too. Lack of universal agreement on a position doesn't invalidate it.
Both our metric for choosing facts and our metric for choosing norms face the same challenges, and I think the solutions to them both are the same, or at least, analogous: phenomenalism (we determine what is true or good based on our experience of what seems true or good, meaning empiricism about the truth and hedonism about the good) and objectivism (whatever is true or good is true or good for everyone, meaning realism about the truth and altruism about the good).
Moral absolutism has to deal with the problem of which moral framework is correct. There is no moral authority in nature so, naturally, different individuals come up with different answers.
There is no factual authority either. We can't just read the laws of physics out of a book. Different individuals come up with different answers.
The only difference is that with facts, we have recently (a few hundred years is recent) devised a method of mediating those disagreements and gradually weeding out unacceptable answers. We still can't just read the laws of physics out of a book, but we can come up with better and better guesses over time.
There is no reason we can't do the same thing with moral laws. Prior to the scientific method, out approach to settling matters of truth was just as haphazard as our current method of settling matters of right and wrong. We made progress there, and we can make progress here too.
The government gives you the property rights. Without the government, you'd have some other group of thugs with guns making sure that people don't just come and take your property.
No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. Unless you want to claim that your right to life is also a gracious gift from the state as well, since without the government enforcing it you'd need some other group of thugs with guns to make sure that people didn't just come and kill you.
The US Constitution - as amended - just prevents requiring you to belong to a particular religion to hold elected office.
No, it prevents the Congress (and via the 14th Amendment, the states as well) from establishing any religion as the official state religion, or prohibiting anybody from practicing their religion. It says in effect that the government cannot preach, or stop anyone else from preaching, any religion.
(And despite that, many state offices explicitly require a religious affirmation anyway -- usually non-denominational, but enough to exclude atheists -- so it really has no impact on holding office at all).
The United States isn't a an unlimited democracy. It is a constitutionally limited democracy. The constitution is there precisely to protect minorities (including the smallest minority, the individual) from the whim of majorities. The law of the land is (ostensibly) liberty for all. The people as a whole (via their elected representatives) are charged with fleshing out, interpreting, and enforcing the rule of that law, but they do not have the right to enforce any arbitrary law they like.
Of course, the system you propose, taken to its logical conclusion, would collapse to this anyway. If we let every dissenting group split off into its own sovereign polity, then that will continue all the way down to the lowest level and we will have a bunch of sovereign individuals, with no say over each other and supreme say over themselves. Which leaves us back at liberty for all, and nobody being allowed to enforce arbitrary laws over anybody else, but still the enforcing of that individual liberty left up to the general people with no special leader in charge of that task.
Only 13 states had laws invalidated by that decision, which means that 74% of the country (the other 37 states) were already way ahead of it. It's not like gay sex was illegal in most of the country until 2003, just the most backward quarter of it.
In the United States, a 2003 Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, ruled that laws regulating what kind of sex consenting adults have in private are unconstitutional.
Yeah, totally agreed that the U.S. poor have it much better than the poor in many other parts of the world. It just struck me that "how many houses and cars one has" doesn't really belong in a discussion of "have-nots", even when talking about the U.S., because as well-off as we may be in terms of at least having some kind of food and shelter (vs maybe none at all in places like Haiti), the have-nots here are still hoping to have a house or a car, never mind "how many". If "how many" is even on the table, you're already far on the "have" side no matter where you are.
Well the difference between the 'have's' and 'have-nots' in the US is really how many houses,cars,TV's, one has.
If "difference between" includes 0 to 1, maybe. Sure, even the very poor often have cheap old TVs, but there's a huge number of people for whom ownership of one single hope is just a distant dream, and a good number for whom a car would be luxury too. I've spent most of my life barely on the car-having side of things, and am just now starting to think that I might be able to own a home by the time I'm too old to work, and not spend my retirement on the street thanks to not having the income to rent anymore.
Well we have no way of proving that, there are areas of the universe that are forever beyond our reach where the laws could be different.
That would just mean that we will never discover what the true physics is. It doesn't change that what we mean by "the true physics" is that which applies everywhere to every phenomenon. If there is some phenomenon that doesn't follow any supposed "law of nature", then that wasn't really a law of nature -- that's what we mean by "law of nature".
Likewise, something can't really count as a "moral law" if it's OK that some people some places break it some times. Whatever could count as a moral law has to be universal. If there are no universal moral laws, then there are no moral laws period -- either way, what some group of people think is irrelevant. Either there is something which is actually correct and they are some degree close to or far from it, or there's nothing which is actually correct and they're all completely wrong everywhere.
Now there is the question of whether there are any moral laws at all and how can we ever know if we've found them. But there's also the same question about physical laws. And my answer to that question is that we can't know in traditional sense whether either of those is true or false, we can only make an assumption one way or another; but that we cannot help but make a tacit assumption one way or another by our actions and that it is always pragmatically better to assume that there is some universal answer to be found. If we assume there are none and there really are none, then we never find out what they are because there are none; if we assume that there are none, but there are some, then we fail to find out what they were, even though we could have if we had assumed there were some and tried to figure them out; if we assume that there are some, but there are none, then we will never find out what they are because there really are none; but if we assume there are some, and there are some, then we stand a chance of finding out what they are.
In other words, we can only make an assumption one way or another about whether there are objectively correct answers. If we assume there are not, then we guarantee that will never find out what they are, even if there are some and we could have figured them out. If we assume that there are, we might still never find them, and there might not actually be any, but if there are any then we at least stand a chance of figuring them out. One of our two possible assumptions guarantees failure; the other opens up the possibility of success. Since we're just making a baseless assumption either way, we may as well act under the assumption that gives us a glimmer of hope, instead of just giving up out the gate.
But moral codes change over time, and it's not a continual smooth evolution towards a 'better' moral code. If there is a universal moral code, we struggle to define it or attain it, and seem to frequently get all turned around and regress from it.
This is because we haven't settled on a moral equivalent of the scientific method yet. Our progress in knowledge about reality was similarly haphazard until we came to broad agreement on what our standard of evidence about reality was (empirical realism) and how to methodically apply that standard (fallibilist, critical rationalism). I think there is a similar method we can use in moral deliberation, and that the basic tenants of it (altruistic hedonism, in a utilitarian sense, and liberalism, in the classical sense) are already fairly popular and widespread, we just haven't yet build a cultural institution out of applying them and propagating the results like we did with the scientific revolution.
So when does all of that become a new moral code for a specific subculture?
When they start enforcing it on their members. And if the more-permissive moral code of the culture they're embedded in was the correct one, then they would be morally in
So his morals are wrong but yours are right? Interesting...I wonder what he thinks of that.
I'm just running with your stipulation of this hypothetical Muslim's behavior as unacceptable, so I'm not going to make an argument for his morals being wrong here, I'm just going to be bold and assume you and I agree on that point. I think mine are better, but I'm not claiming inerrancy on that or any matters. My morals are also not my culture's morals; I think many things about my own culture's morals are wrong. In fact I'd hesitate to name anyone, any culture or individual, whose morals I subscribe to entirely. But I will argue forcefully that even if we are all objectively wrong, that something is still universally moral, and that some of us are closer to understanding that than others, and we can all continually get closer still.
I'll put it this way: whichever morals are right, they aren't my morals. That is, I can't claim any ownership or authorship over them. Nobody can. It's like truth: the truth isn't my truth or anyone else's, it just is. Nobody made it the truth, nobody had to make it the truth, it doesn't require any cultural acceptance to be the truth, it doesn't require any divine decree to be the truth, it's just... whatever it is that happens to be true. Likewise with the good. All any of us can do in either case is struggle to correctly identify what that is, to varying degrees of success.
The majority of theists believe that morals are passed down from whatever deity they believe in, and are therefore perfect, universal and unchangeable. This gets problematic, of course, when different theologies believe that different things are moral/immoral.
Universalism is different from infallibilism. Take physics for a non-moral example. Whatever the laws of physics are, they apply to everything everywhere; if they didn't, they wouldn't be laws of physics. But no physicist ever thinks that they are in possession of the perfect, final physics; every theory is always open to revision. But whichever theory actually is correct -- even if we never precisely identify it -- is universally correct.
The problem with religion is its infallibilism, not its universalism.
Of course, the way we normally cope with this is that visitors adapt to the cultural norms of the place that they're visiting ("when in Rome"). It usually works fine, until you get asshats who are convinced that their $deity-given morals trump your weak western culturally-defined morals and they can behave like they at home regardless of who it upsets.
Or you get, say, a woman from a more enlightened society walking alone in a sun dress through a backward country and being violently punished for her heinous crime. But hey, that's the local law. When in Rome, right? Live and let live, right? Even when "letting live" means letting them not let someone else live.
I'm struggling to see what does define moralily if it isn't culture, or indeed, how you define a culture without including its morality.
If your morality is permissive, that is, it has things which are neither obligatory nor forbidden, but which you can do or not do as you choose, then there is room for many different voluntary ways of living. Your clothes, your food, your language, your rituals, your games, your stories, your songs; there are the parts of culture which are not matters of moral concern, for a properly permissive sense of morality at least, and such a morality will allow many clusters of such morally irrelevant (but personally significant) cultural patterns to coexist.
Writing implicitly threatening physical assault ("You should be happy you got this card and not a punch in the face") certainly counts as violence. The whole point of it is to put men on the receiving end of the intimidation women perceive (i.e. 'have sex when someone asks you to or they might hurt you'). Saying that it's "hilarious" when men are thus intimidated certainly count as "think[ing] female-on-male violence is funny".
Given that it's apparently acceptable for a country to define a set of rules or cultural norms based on a religion that allows, even condones, behaviour like this, and OK for members of that country to take those cultural norms on holiday with them...
If we were given that, then yes, what you say would be the logical conclusion. Good thing we are not given that, because...
...how do you get him to see that his morals are not absolute and don't cover everyone?
This is false. Well ok, when qualified with "his" it's true -- the morals such people as you describe propound are not the universally correct ones -- but there are some universally correct ones, that do cover everyone. Those are generally quite permissive, so there's a lot of room for different cultures to maintain their differences without violating them, but whatever actions really aren't OK, really aren't OK anywhere, no matter how many local douchebags think they are.
Denying that leads to exactly the kind of absurdities you illustrate here: the possibility of mutually-exclusive culturally-defined moralities having to be simultaneously adhered to whenever those different cultures meet. It's logically impossible, and is a great reductio ad absurdum against morality being culturally defined.
That doesn't say that the Government must redress anything which anybody grieves over. It doesn't even say it must enable them with a forum for petitioning for such. It just says it can't stop them from petitioning. It can't make it illegal to call for the government to do something. That clause protects the right to protest; it doesn't entitle anyone be provided a place to protest, much less to get what they protested for.
Rape fantasy and its elder brother the S&M subculture both need to be, if not actively stamped out, at least actively despised by as many people as possible, on a permanent basis. No comment on "rape fantasy" per se, but as someone with extensive exposure to (though minimal involvement in) the BDSM community, I can testify that they are if anything some of the <em>most</em> proactive about making very explicitly sure that everything is consensual, specifically because if they weren't, there would be so much more room for unfortunate confusion than usual. BDSM activities are full of all kinds of rules and safeties and explicit negotiations about what is or isn't OK ahead of time, making everything that follows far more clear than two strangers drunk off their asses who wake up the next morning unable to remember who stuck what into whose where.
So voting 3rd party only helps (in this immediate election) if the guy you would otherwise have voted for would have been worse than the guy you were never going to vote for anyway. That's the problem: voting 3rd party helps 'the other guy' win, and so only does you immediate good (aside from any long-term goods voting 3rd party might accomplish) if it turns out you were going to vote for the wrong guy otherwise. And obviously nobody thinks they were going to vote for the wrong guy (by what standard of wrong, anyway?), so a 3rd party vote, without some serious chance of them actually winning, will always seem "wasted".
I am fortunate enough to live in an area where my preferred of the two major parties is virtually guaranteed to win whether I vote or not, so I can vote my conscience whichever way it swings without worrying about letting any of my least favorites win. But not everybody is so lucky.
Contrary to what many think, the U.S. is not a Democracy, its a Republic I get so tired of people spouting this off like it means something.
A republic is necessarily democratic. A republic is a government of the people -- literally a "people's thing", <em>res publica</em>. Democracy is rule by the people. The two terms are virtually synonyms. (You can technically have a government which is not a republic -- where supreme authority ostensibly resides in the hands of someone besides the people -- which is nevertheless governed day-to-day by democratic methods. The UK's monarchy is one prominent current example of this).
The distinction you're trying to make is between a direct democracy and a representative democracy. Both the US and the UK have representative democracies, but one (the US) is a republic and the other (the UK) is not.
This reminds me of an essay, Architecting Governware, that I wrote about a year ago. This one makes a more explicit analogy, and draws political conclusions from the software metaphor rather than the other way around, and compares libertarianism and socialism rather than "conservativism" and "liberalism" (which are not antonyms except by historical accident of the earliest progressives being liberals), but it's similar nevertheless:
There are two ostensibly competing approaches to architecting software: designing the front-end first and then programming whatever necessary to produce that front-end; or programming the back-end first and allowing whatever interface design flows naturally from that back-end to surface.
Software architected solely by designers often looks nice and is "easy to use" in one sense: approachable to the general user and not just the technological elite. But such software is just as frequently horribly inefficient, inconsistent, and buggy, making it in other senses very difficult to use outside of its prime use cases.
Software architected solely by programmers, on the other hand, may be a marvel of ingenious consistency and efficiency and may even be provably mathematically correct. But it will often have an interface apparently based in the philosophy that if you can't figure this out on your own, you don't deserve to use such software.
The technological elite often prefer software architected more by programmers than by designers, because they have the ability to make precision demands of it and have it do exactly what they want, and it stays out of their way otherwise; whereas designer-architected software tends to slow them down and keep them from doing what they are trying to do.
General users, on the other hand, often prefer software architected more by designers than by programmers, because for whatever faults it has, most of them can usually at least go about using it somewhat and get some kind of functionality out of it, instead of having to beg or pay the technological elite to get them what they need.
But the best software is undoubtedly architected by teams with both design insights and programming insights, collaborating to create a product which consistently and efficiently offers the desired functionality in an appealing, intuitive, discoverable manner, approachable to general users without holding back the more adept, and even making the latter more productive in their work.
Socialists are like software designers: they have all the right ends in mind, they want to make the world a place that is comfortable and easy to make a living in for anyone, not just an elite few; but they often have no regards for the correctness of the means used to reach these ends. For the sake of justice, equality, and the general welfare, they will often disregard or downplay the possibility of such means to lead to a lower overall welfare for the whole of society (inefficiency), of dissolving the principle of equality before the law (inconsistency), or of commiting injustices themselves in the pursuit of the "greater good" (incorrectness).
Libertarians, on the other hand, are like software programmers: they place tremendous emphasis on never allowing the smallest violation of rights to fly (correctness), on treating everyone as exactly equal before the law (consistency), and within those restraints, on generating the greatest output for the least cost (efficiency). However, they often stop there and assume that the best outcome will just naturally follow from this with no further effort necessary; and that if people can't make themselves a comfortable, easy living within such a framework, then they obviously must be doing something wrong and not deserve such wealth anyway.
The wealthy social elite often prefer a government adhereing to libertarian principles more than socialist ones, because they already have the means of getting what they need from it, and
Assertions, true or false: The father is proud of his son. The graduate's younger sister wants an ice cream. The mother is very happy.
The first assertion is <strong>not necessarily true (therefore false)</strong>, how do we know the smiling man is father, uncle, family friend, whatever?
The second assertion is not necessarily true, how do you know she is related to the graduate? Where does it say anything about ice-cream? She could potentially be a young boy with long hair in girls clothing.
The third assertion, mother? How do we know the woman has children? How do we know any of those present is related. It's also false.</quote> Emphasis added, as there are some clear critical thinking skill absent here.
My name is Forrest. Given that fact, answer true or false: am I wearing a hat at the moment?
I have provided no information about the state of my headgear. If you were to assume I am wearing a hat, that would be presumptuous. But if you were to assume that I was <em>not</em> wearing a hat, simply because you lack any information suggesting I am, that would be equally presumptuous.
This is one of the major things a critical thinking class should be teaching you. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you cannot assume the negation of every unsupported proposition, because it is entirely possible and extremely common for contrary positions to be equally unsupported, and you can't assume both of their negations without contradiction. The only rational default position is "maybe, maybe not" until something suggests otherwise. (And even then, the most that's normally warranted is various degrees of "probably" or "probably not").
I understand the need to have different classes of competition otherwise whole demographics (like women) will almost always be excluded. But why does this have to be drawn along explicitly sexual lines? Why not something like boxing's weight categories? Determine whatever attribute it is which typical women typically lack compared to men which justifies the separate women's category, and just categorize people by that attribute, without calling it "women's" or "men's".
Sure, demographically you will end up with even mixes of the best women and the 10th-best men competing against each other in the lower category, and mostly men and the rare superwoman competing against each other in the upper category, but if that's what the demographics are then so be it.
Better still, why not let everybody compete in one category, and then besides the main award, give out separate awards for "best in [whatever] demographic", e.g. strongest female weightlifter or fastest white runner. Let the official olympic committee determine only the total ranking of all players, and let whatever subcomittees want to form determine the criteria by which they select members of their set -- pre-sorted from the total set -- for their special awards.
If you go past the Silmarillion proper, I think the Atalante (Fall of Numenor) would make a very impressive prequel to LotR.
I think you mean Akallabeth (yeah I know, same meaning, different language, but that's what the book is called).
And I agree, it would make for an awesome prequel. The climax certainly has the greatest special effects potential of any moment in the history of Ea. I would love to see the Bending of the World on screen, watch the seas torn asunder and Numenor fall into them as Aman floats off into the distant stars along the Straight Path, and the camera slowly pulls back high over Endor to show the curvature of the newly-shaped world.
I would make the Akallabeth the centerpiece of a prequel trilogy pulling from the Silmarillion and other supplemental materials. I would tell it in reverse order, tied together by a framing story of Aragon explaining to his son Eldarion the history of Arnor (as they reestablish that kingdom in the early Fourth Era), and from there the history of Numenor, and before that the start of the line of high Men.
The first part would be predominantly about the downfall of Arnor and the battles against the Witch-King of Angmar, culminating in the line of kings becoming the Rangers of the North. That way we get to see familiar peoples and a familiar villain (the Lord of the Nazgul), and the early influence of the Rings of Power, tying it directly into the LotR. The prologue to this story would briefly tell of the history of how Arnor and Gondor were settled and how Arnor began to splinter prior to the Witch-King's attacks, much like the prologue to Fellowship tells of the Last Alliance and how the Ring was lost.
The second part would tell of the downfall of Numenor. This would get to feature Sauron as a prominent villain, in his fair form as Annatar, and so still have strong connections directly to LotR. It would of course culminate in the Bending of the World and the survival of Elendil (who would star) to found Arnor and Gondor. The prologue to this part would tell, if you'll note the pattern here, of how Numenor was given as a gift to the Edain, and how it slowly grew corrupt, before telling of its last days.
The third part would tell the tale of Earendil, culminating in the War of Wrath, and victory over Melkor, "ending" the trilogy on a high note despite it all generally being a bunch of downers. The prologue to this would of course establish how the silmarils were forged and stolen and the Sons of Feanor's quest for vengeance. Somewhere in there the story of Beren and Luthien would have to be told, to establish how Earendil gets his silmaril via his wife Elwing, Beren and Luthien's granddaughter; this could be an extended flashback recounted during Earendil and Elwing's courtship. Of course their sons Elrond and Elros will feature in here as well, establishing more familiar faces from LotR. In the epilogue Numenor is granted to the Edain for their help in the War of Wrath, with Elros as its first king, and the line of kings from Elros down through Elendil to our narrator Elessar (Aragorn) and his son Eldarion is briefly recounted, wrapping the whole story up; perhaps ending on a shot of the Evening Star as their day concludes, and Earendil continues to sail the sky with his silmaril shining bright.
Just because they don't uphold their guarantees doesn't mean they haven't guaranteed it.
Also, I wouldn't say driver's licensing is different, and pretty much agree with you on all points.
... anonymous free speech being guaranteed in writing and all
Sorry, I may have missed the memo. Where was that guaranteed in writing?
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
If you have to jump through some government hoop (like registering your name and prole number in a central government registry) in order be permitted to speak (or write) freely, that abridges your freedom of speech (or press); that would be saying "you are not allowed to speak (or write) unless you do X", and they are not allowed to decree "you are not allowed to speak (or write)".
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I think you're going to run into insurmountable problems with objectivism. There are some "universal truths" that we seem to be predisposed towards from our evolutionary origins as social primates, but those are really basic, and occasionally include things that at least some of our societies widely consider wrong now on a purely conscious and rational level (e.g. xenophobia and parochial altruism). Other than that, the notion of "good" is cultural, and therefore not universal. How would you deal with that problem?
Our perception of what is real is also predisposed in certain ways from our evolution (and differs in subtle ways between some people, and in major ways between species), includes what we now recognize as errors (e.g. optical illusions), is incomplete, and the processes we evolved to fill in the gaps are biased both personally and culturally. Yet we make use of our senses to determine the truth, and don't doubt that there is an objective truth that even us and a vastly different intelligent alien species could agree about.
The subtle difference in wording in those two sentences is important: senses versus perception. The scientific method has us look past our intuitive interpretation of our senses, look past what we perceive, and pay attention to the specific sensations (or observations) themselves. It is impossible for two observations per se to contradict; only our interpretations of them may contradict, and if we find a set of observations which seem to support one interpretation and other observations which contradict it, we don't say "well I guess reality isn't objective after all", we say "our interpretation is wrong and we need to find a new one which is consistent with all these observations". Sometimes this requires thinking way outside the box and coming up with things that nobody's intuitive perception of the world would agree with, but which nevertheless is what is indicated when you take all the evidence into account -- that's how we end up with things like relativity and quantum mechanics.
Similarly, I think that our normative analogue of the scientific method will have to go past just polling people about what they emotionally desire and trying to meet all those (possibly contradictory) desires. That would be like conducting science by polling people about their (possibly contradictory) intuitive perceptions and somehow trying to reconcile them all together. Instead, in science, we verify every reported observation ourselves, and try to construct models consistent with all of the verified observations, and then try to find any fault we can in every proposed model, and only tentatively move forward with using a model when exhaustive efforts to tear it down have failed. Likewise, I think our normative analogue of science needs to ask not "what do people want" but "what is it like to live as a person in this or that circumstance" -- something like emic* ethnography. Then take all those accounts of what life "feels like" from all these different perspectives and propose a strategy, a plan of action (analogous here to a theory), which would have consequences that alleviate some suffering (analogous to explaining some observation) without causing any other suffering (analogous to predicting something contrary to observation). The second part is very important and is analogous to trying to falsify a theory: before moving ahead with any strategy, try to tear it down by finding someone it would hurt. Not just someone who objects to it -- that'd be like discarding a theory because someone disagreed with it -- but someone it would hurt, as confirmed by such emic ethnography. Only when a strategy would be useful (alleviate some suffering) and has survived thorough attempts to... lets say "vilify" it (by analogy to "falsify")... should we proceed with it; and even then, only tentatively, constantly watchful for consequent harm that might successfully rule it out.
And yes, that mea
But there is. With physical laws, you verify them by making experiments. The result of every experiment either supports the theory, or it does not, or it's neutral.
When you're doing an experiment on a moral law, what metric of success do you apply to the result? Utilitarian? But many people would say that this metric itself is wrong. On what grounds will you pick one metric over another? That in itself is a moral choice.
That is a philosophical "choice"; or position, at least. But so is the choice to appeal to empirical observations in determining truth. Many (e.g. religious) people reject the scientific method as "just another religion" too. Lack of universal agreement on a position doesn't invalidate it.
Both our metric for choosing facts and our metric for choosing norms face the same challenges, and I think the solutions to them both are the same, or at least, analogous: phenomenalism (we determine what is true or good based on our experience of what seems true or good, meaning empiricism about the truth and hedonism about the good) and objectivism (whatever is true or good is true or good for everyone, meaning realism about the truth and altruism about the good).
Moral absolutism has to deal with the problem of which moral framework is correct. There is no moral authority in nature so, naturally, different individuals come up with different answers.
There is no factual authority either. We can't just read the laws of physics out of a book. Different individuals come up with different answers.
The only difference is that with facts, we have recently (a few hundred years is recent) devised a method of mediating those disagreements and gradually weeding out unacceptable answers. We still can't just read the laws of physics out of a book, but we can come up with better and better guesses over time.
There is no reason we can't do the same thing with moral laws. Prior to the scientific method, out approach to settling matters of truth was just as haphazard as our current method of settling matters of right and wrong. We made progress there, and we can make progress here too.
The government gives you the property rights. Without the government, you'd have some other group of thugs with guns making sure that people don't just come and take your property.
No, the government enforces your rights (or they should), it doesn't give them to you. Unless you want to claim that your right to life is also a gracious gift from the state as well, since without the government enforcing it you'd need some other group of thugs with guns to make sure that people didn't just come and kill you.
The US Constitution - as amended - just prevents requiring you to belong to a particular religion to hold elected office.
No, it prevents the Congress (and via the 14th Amendment, the states as well) from establishing any religion as the official state religion, or prohibiting anybody from practicing their religion. It says in effect that the government cannot preach, or stop anyone else from preaching, any religion.
(And despite that, many state offices explicitly require a religious affirmation anyway -- usually non-denominational, but enough to exclude atheists -- so it really has no impact on holding office at all).
The United States isn't a an unlimited democracy. It is a constitutionally limited democracy. The constitution is there precisely to protect minorities (including the smallest minority, the individual) from the whim of majorities. The law of the land is (ostensibly) liberty for all. The people as a whole (via their elected representatives) are charged with fleshing out, interpreting, and enforcing the rule of that law, but they do not have the right to enforce any arbitrary law they like.
Of course, the system you propose, taken to its logical conclusion, would collapse to this anyway. If we let every dissenting group split off into its own sovereign polity, then that will continue all the way down to the lowest level and we will have a bunch of sovereign individuals, with no say over each other and supreme say over themselves. Which leaves us back at liberty for all, and nobody being allowed to enforce arbitrary laws over anybody else, but still the enforcing of that individual liberty left up to the general people with no special leader in charge of that task.
Only 13 states had laws invalidated by that decision, which means that 74% of the country (the other 37 states) were already way ahead of it. It's not like gay sex was illegal in most of the country until 2003, just the most backward quarter of it.
In the United States, a 2003 Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas, ruled that laws regulating what kind of sex consenting adults have in private are unconstitutional.
Yeah, totally agreed that the U.S. poor have it much better than the poor in many other parts of the world. It just struck me that "how many houses and cars one has" doesn't really belong in a discussion of "have-nots", even when talking about the U.S., because as well-off as we may be in terms of at least having some kind of food and shelter (vs maybe none at all in places like Haiti), the have-nots here are still hoping to have a house or a car, never mind "how many". If "how many" is even on the table, you're already far on the "have" side no matter where you are.
Well the difference between the 'have's' and 'have-nots' in the US is really how many houses,cars,TV's, one has.
If "difference between" includes 0 to 1, maybe. Sure, even the very poor often have cheap old TVs, but there's a huge number of people for whom ownership of one single hope is just a distant dream, and a good number for whom a car would be luxury too. I've spent most of my life barely on the car-having side of things, and am just now starting to think that I might be able to own a home by the time I'm too old to work, and not spend my retirement on the street thanks to not having the income to rent anymore.
Well we have no way of proving that, there are areas of the universe that are forever beyond our reach where the laws could be different.
That would just mean that we will never discover what the true physics is. It doesn't change that what we mean by "the true physics" is that which applies everywhere to every phenomenon. If there is some phenomenon that doesn't follow any supposed "law of nature", then that wasn't really a law of nature -- that's what we mean by "law of nature".
Likewise, something can't really count as a "moral law" if it's OK that some people some places break it some times. Whatever could count as a moral law has to be universal. If there are no universal moral laws, then there are no moral laws period -- either way, what some group of people think is irrelevant. Either there is something which is actually correct and they are some degree close to or far from it, or there's nothing which is actually correct and they're all completely wrong everywhere.
Now there is the question of whether there are any moral laws at all and how can we ever know if we've found them. But there's also the same question about physical laws. And my answer to that question is that we can't know in traditional sense whether either of those is true or false, we can only make an assumption one way or another; but that we cannot help but make a tacit assumption one way or another by our actions and that it is always pragmatically better to assume that there is some universal answer to be found. If we assume there are none and there really are none, then we never find out what they are because there are none; if we assume that there are none, but there are some, then we fail to find out what they were, even though we could have if we had assumed there were some and tried to figure them out; if we assume that there are some, but there are none, then we will never find out what they are because there really are none; but if we assume there are some, and there are some, then we stand a chance of finding out what they are.
In other words, we can only make an assumption one way or another about whether there are objectively correct answers. If we assume there are not, then we guarantee that will never find out what they are, even if there are some and we could have figured them out. If we assume that there are, we might still never find them, and there might not actually be any, but if there are any then we at least stand a chance of figuring them out. One of our two possible assumptions guarantees failure; the other opens up the possibility of success. Since we're just making a baseless assumption either way, we may as well act under the assumption that gives us a glimmer of hope, instead of just giving up out the gate.
But moral codes change over time, and it's not a continual smooth evolution towards a 'better' moral code. If there is a universal moral code, we struggle to define it or attain it, and seem to frequently get all turned around and regress from it.
This is because we haven't settled on a moral equivalent of the scientific method yet. Our progress in knowledge about reality was similarly haphazard until we came to broad agreement on what our standard of evidence about reality was (empirical realism) and how to methodically apply that standard (fallibilist, critical rationalism). I think there is a similar method we can use in moral deliberation, and that the basic tenants of it (altruistic hedonism, in a utilitarian sense, and liberalism, in the classical sense) are already fairly popular and widespread, we just haven't yet build a cultural institution out of applying them and propagating the results like we did with the scientific revolution.
So when does all of that become a new moral code for a specific subculture?
When they start enforcing it on their members. And if the more-permissive moral code of the culture they're embedded in was the correct one, then they would be morally in
So his morals are wrong but yours are right? Interesting...I wonder what he thinks of that.
I'm just running with your stipulation of this hypothetical Muslim's behavior as unacceptable, so I'm not going to make an argument for his morals being wrong here, I'm just going to be bold and assume you and I agree on that point. I think mine are better, but I'm not claiming inerrancy on that or any matters. My morals are also not my culture's morals; I think many things about my own culture's morals are wrong. In fact I'd hesitate to name anyone, any culture or individual, whose morals I subscribe to entirely. But I will argue forcefully that even if we are all objectively wrong, that something is still universally moral, and that some of us are closer to understanding that than others, and we can all continually get closer still.
I'll put it this way: whichever morals are right, they aren't my morals. That is, I can't claim any ownership or authorship over them. Nobody can. It's like truth: the truth isn't my truth or anyone else's, it just is. Nobody made it the truth, nobody had to make it the truth, it doesn't require any cultural acceptance to be the truth, it doesn't require any divine decree to be the truth, it's just... whatever it is that happens to be true. Likewise with the good. All any of us can do in either case is struggle to correctly identify what that is, to varying degrees of success.
The majority of theists believe that morals are passed down from whatever deity they believe in, and are therefore perfect, universal and unchangeable. This gets problematic, of course, when different theologies believe that different things are moral/immoral.
Universalism is different from infallibilism. Take physics for a non-moral example. Whatever the laws of physics are, they apply to everything everywhere; if they didn't, they wouldn't be laws of physics. But no physicist ever thinks that they are in possession of the perfect, final physics; every theory is always open to revision. But whichever theory actually is correct -- even if we never precisely identify it -- is universally correct.
The problem with religion is its infallibilism, not its universalism.
Of course, the way we normally cope with this is that visitors adapt to the cultural norms of the place that they're visiting ("when in Rome"). It usually works fine, until you get asshats who are convinced that their $deity-given morals trump your weak western culturally-defined morals and they can behave like they at home regardless of who it upsets.
Or you get, say, a woman from a more enlightened society walking alone in a sun dress through a backward country and being violently punished for her heinous crime. But hey, that's the local law. When in Rome, right? Live and let live, right? Even when "letting live" means letting them not let someone else live.
I'm struggling to see what does define moralily if it isn't culture, or indeed, how you define a culture without including its morality.
If your morality is permissive, that is, it has things which are neither obligatory nor forbidden, but which you can do or not do as you choose, then there is room for many different voluntary ways of living. Your clothes, your food, your language, your rituals, your games, your stories, your songs; there are the parts of culture which are not matters of moral concern, for a properly permissive sense of morality at least, and such a morality will allow many clusters of such morally irrelevant (but personally significant) cultural patterns to coexist.
Writing implicitly threatening physical assault ("You should be happy you got this card and not a punch in the face") certainly counts as violence. The whole point of it is to put men on the receiving end of the intimidation women perceive (i.e. 'have sex when someone asks you to or they might hurt you'). Saying that it's "hilarious" when men are thus intimidated certainly count as "think[ing] female-on-male violence is funny".
Given that it's apparently acceptable for a country to define a set of rules or cultural norms based on a religion that allows, even condones, behaviour like this, and OK for members of that country to take those cultural norms on holiday with them...
If we were given that, then yes, what you say would be the logical conclusion. Good thing we are not given that, because...
...how do you get him to see that his morals are not absolute and don't cover everyone?
This is false. Well ok, when qualified with "his" it's true -- the morals such people as you describe propound are not the universally correct ones -- but there are some universally correct ones, that do cover everyone. Those are generally quite permissive, so there's a lot of room for different cultures to maintain their differences without violating them, but whatever actions really aren't OK, really aren't OK anywhere, no matter how many local douchebags think they are.
Denying that leads to exactly the kind of absurdities you illustrate here: the possibility of mutually-exclusive culturally-defined moralities having to be simultaneously adhered to whenever those different cultures meet. It's logically impossible, and is a great reductio ad absurdum against morality being culturally defined.
That doesn't say that the Government must redress anything which anybody grieves over. It doesn't even say it must enable them with a forum for petitioning for such. It just says it can't stop them from petitioning. It can't make it illegal to call for the government to do something. That clause protects the right to protest; it doesn't entitle anyone be provided a place to protest, much less to get what they protested for.
Rape fantasy and its elder brother the S&M subculture both need to be, if not actively stamped out, at least actively despised by as many people as possible, on a permanent basis.
No comment on "rape fantasy" per se, but as someone with extensive exposure to (though minimal involvement in) the BDSM community, I can testify that they are if anything some of the <em>most</em> proactive about making very explicitly sure that everything is consensual, specifically because if they weren't, there would be so much more room for unfortunate confusion than usual. BDSM activities are full of all kinds of rules and safeties and explicit negotiations about what is or isn't OK ahead of time, making everything that follows far more clear than two strangers drunk off their asses who wake up the next morning unable to remember who stuck what into whose where.
So voting 3rd party only helps (in this immediate election) if the guy you would otherwise have voted for would have been worse than the guy you were never going to vote for anyway. That's the problem: voting 3rd party helps 'the other guy' win, and so only does you immediate good (aside from any long-term goods voting 3rd party might accomplish) if it turns out you were going to vote for the wrong guy otherwise. And obviously nobody thinks they were going to vote for the wrong guy (by what standard of wrong, anyway?), so a 3rd party vote, without some serious chance of them actually winning, will always seem "wasted".
I am fortunate enough to live in an area where my preferred of the two major parties is virtually guaranteed to win whether I vote or not, so I can vote my conscience whichever way it swings without worrying about letting any of my least favorites win. But not everybody is so lucky.
Contrary to what many think, the U.S. is not a Democracy, its a Republic
I get so tired of people spouting this off like it means something.
A republic is necessarily democratic. A republic is a government of the people -- literally a "people's thing", <em>res publica</em>. Democracy is rule by the people. The two terms are virtually synonyms. (You can technically have a government which is not a republic -- where supreme authority ostensibly resides in the hands of someone besides the people -- which is nevertheless governed day-to-day by democratic methods. The UK's monarchy is one prominent current example of this).
The distinction you're trying to make is between a direct democracy and a representative democracy. Both the US and the UK have representative democracies, but one (the US) is a republic and the other (the UK) is not.
This reminds me of an essay, Architecting Governware, that I wrote about a year ago. This one makes a more explicit analogy, and draws political conclusions from the software metaphor rather than the other way around, and compares libertarianism and socialism rather than "conservativism" and "liberalism" (which are not antonyms except by historical accident of the earliest progressives being liberals), but it's similar nevertheless:
There are two ostensibly competing approaches to architecting software: designing the front-end first and then programming whatever necessary to produce that front-end; or programming the back-end first and allowing whatever interface design flows naturally from that back-end to surface.
Software architected solely by designers often looks nice and is "easy to use" in one sense: approachable to the general user and not just the technological elite. But such software is just as frequently horribly inefficient, inconsistent, and buggy, making it in other senses very difficult to use outside of its prime use cases.
Software architected solely by programmers, on the other hand, may be a marvel of ingenious consistency and efficiency and may even be provably mathematically correct. But it will often have an interface apparently based in the philosophy that if you can't figure this out on your own, you don't deserve to use such software.
The technological elite often prefer software architected more by programmers than by designers, because they have the ability to make precision demands of it and have it do exactly what they want, and it stays out of their way otherwise; whereas designer-architected software tends to slow them down and keep them from doing what they are trying to do.
General users, on the other hand, often prefer software architected more by designers than by programmers, because for whatever faults it has, most of them can usually at least go about using it somewhat and get some kind of functionality out of it, instead of having to beg or pay the technological elite to get them what they need.
But the best software is undoubtedly architected by teams with both design insights and programming insights, collaborating to create a product which consistently and efficiently offers the desired functionality in an appealing, intuitive, discoverable manner, approachable to general users without holding back the more adept, and even making the latter more productive in their work.
Socialists are like software designers: they have all the right ends in mind, they want to make the world a place that is comfortable and easy to make a living in for anyone, not just an elite few; but they often have no regards for the correctness of the means used to reach these ends. For the sake of justice, equality, and the general welfare, they will often disregard or downplay the possibility of such means to lead to a lower overall welfare for the whole of society (inefficiency), of dissolving the principle of equality before the law (inconsistency), or of commiting injustices themselves in the pursuit of the "greater good" (incorrectness).
Libertarians, on the other hand, are like software programmers: they place tremendous emphasis on never allowing the smallest violation of rights to fly (correctness), on treating everyone as exactly equal before the law (consistency), and within those restraints, on generating the greatest output for the least cost (efficiency). However, they often stop there and assume that the best outcome will just naturally follow from this with no further effort necessary; and that if people can't make themselves a comfortable, easy living within such a framework, then they obviously must be doing something wrong and not deserve such wealth anyway.
The wealthy social elite often prefer a government adhereing to libertarian principles more than socialist ones, because they already have the means of getting what they need from it, and
Assertions, true or false: The father is proud of his son. The graduate's younger sister wants an ice cream. The mother is very happy.
The first assertion is <strong>not necessarily true (therefore false)</strong>, how do we know the smiling man is father, uncle, family friend, whatever?
The second assertion is not necessarily true, how do you know she is related to the graduate? Where does it say anything about ice-cream? She could potentially be a young boy with long hair in girls clothing.
The third assertion, mother? How do we know the woman has children? How do we know any of those present is related. It's also false.</quote>
Emphasis added, as there are some clear critical thinking skill absent here.
My name is Forrest. Given that fact, answer true or false: am I wearing a hat at the moment?
I have provided no information about the state of my headgear. If you were to assume I am wearing a hat, that would be presumptuous. But if you were to assume that I was <em>not</em> wearing a hat, simply because you lack any information suggesting I am, that would be equally presumptuous.
This is one of the major things a critical thinking class should be teaching you. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and you cannot assume the negation of every unsupported proposition, because it is entirely possible and extremely common for contrary positions to be equally unsupported, and you can't assume both of their negations without contradiction. The only rational default position is "maybe, maybe not" until something suggests otherwise. (And even then, the most that's normally warranted is various degrees of "probably" or "probably not").
I understand the need to have different classes of competition otherwise whole demographics (like women) will almost always be excluded. But why does this have to be drawn along explicitly sexual lines? Why not something like boxing's weight categories? Determine whatever attribute it is which typical women typically lack compared to men which justifies the separate women's category, and just categorize people by that attribute, without calling it "women's" or "men's".
Sure, demographically you will end up with even mixes of the best women and the 10th-best men competing against each other in the lower category, and mostly men and the rare superwoman competing against each other in the upper category, but if that's what the demographics are then so be it.
Better still, why not let everybody compete in one category, and then besides the main award, give out separate awards for "best in [whatever] demographic", e.g. strongest female weightlifter or fastest white runner. Let the official olympic committee determine only the total ranking of all players, and let whatever subcomittees want to form determine the criteria by which they select members of their set -- pre-sorted from the total set -- for their special awards.
If you go past the Silmarillion proper, I think the Atalante (Fall of Numenor) would make a very impressive prequel to LotR.
I think you mean Akallabeth (yeah I know, same meaning, different language, but that's what the book is called).
And I agree, it would make for an awesome prequel. The climax certainly has the greatest special effects potential of any moment in the history of Ea. I would love to see the Bending of the World on screen, watch the seas torn asunder and Numenor fall into them as Aman floats off into the distant stars along the Straight Path, and the camera slowly pulls back high over Endor to show the curvature of the newly-shaped world.
I would make the Akallabeth the centerpiece of a prequel trilogy pulling from the Silmarillion and other supplemental materials. I would tell it in reverse order, tied together by a framing story of Aragon explaining to his son Eldarion the history of Arnor (as they reestablish that kingdom in the early Fourth Era), and from there the history of Numenor, and before that the start of the line of high Men.
The first part would be predominantly about the downfall of Arnor and the battles against the Witch-King of Angmar, culminating in the line of kings becoming the Rangers of the North. That way we get to see familiar peoples and a familiar villain (the Lord of the Nazgul), and the early influence of the Rings of Power, tying it directly into the LotR. The prologue to this story would briefly tell of the history of how Arnor and Gondor were settled and how Arnor began to splinter prior to the Witch-King's attacks, much like the prologue to Fellowship tells of the Last Alliance and how the Ring was lost.
The second part would tell of the downfall of Numenor. This would get to feature Sauron as a prominent villain, in his fair form as Annatar, and so still have strong connections directly to LotR. It would of course culminate in the Bending of the World and the survival of Elendil (who would star) to found Arnor and Gondor. The prologue to this part would tell, if you'll note the pattern here, of how Numenor was given as a gift to the Edain, and how it slowly grew corrupt, before telling of its last days.
The third part would tell the tale of Earendil, culminating in the War of Wrath, and victory over Melkor, "ending" the trilogy on a high note despite it all generally being a bunch of downers. The prologue to this would of course establish how the silmarils were forged and stolen and the Sons of Feanor's quest for vengeance. Somewhere in there the story of Beren and Luthien would have to be told, to establish how Earendil gets his silmaril via his wife Elwing, Beren and Luthien's granddaughter; this could be an extended flashback recounted during Earendil and Elwing's courtship. Of course their sons Elrond and Elros will feature in here as well, establishing more familiar faces from LotR. In the epilogue Numenor is granted to the Edain for their help in the War of Wrath, with Elros as its first king, and the line of kings from Elros down through Elendil to our narrator Elessar (Aragorn) and his son Eldarion is briefly recounted, wrapping the whole story up; perhaps ending on a shot of the Evening Star as their day concludes, and Earendil continues to sail the sky with his silmaril shining bright.
Just because they don't uphold their guarantees doesn't mean they haven't guaranteed it. Also, I wouldn't say driver's licensing is different, and pretty much agree with you on all points.
Coming This Summer...
... anonymous free speech being guaranteed in writing and all
Sorry, I may have missed the memo. Where was that guaranteed in writing?
"Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." If you have to jump through some government hoop (like registering your name and prole number in a central government registry) in order be permitted to speak (or write) freely, that abridges your freedom of speech (or press); that would be saying "you are not allowed to speak (or write) unless you do X", and they are not allowed to decree "you are not allowed to speak (or write)".