It's a fact of our particular social situation, and about the research surrounding how social situations shift and change in response to equalities of representation. "Absoluteness" doesn't come into it. Or, indeed, anything claiming any kind of legitimacy to scientific practice. Such a vague word, "absolute", don't you think?
That's not what I said, but if believing that's what I said makes you feel better, then fine.
It wasn't about making me feel better. It was a correct interpretation of what you said. You stated, specifically, that in any case other than that in which I am a God that decides absolute correctness, you conclude that ethical judgement is simply subjective - by which, on the standard reading of subjectivity in ethics, you take it that it is decided by individual people for themselves. By which, you must, logically, include yourself.
As regards "absolute" morals, I'm not really fussed. Factive ethics is more than good enough for my point to get off the ground, and as mentioned above, that position is well supported by the statistical research of some excellent investigators.
You don't need to argue that people are free to avoid criticism, or even possibly medically motivated intervention, in order to argue that they ought not to be excluded from society. There is a hidden premise tying these things together, which says that societal exclusion is acceptable, perhaps even mandated, punishment for those who refuse to take responsibility for themselves. For the most part, the evidence of our prison systems says that this premise is plainly mistaken.
Who said anything about "Absolute" morals? Being an ethical realist doesn't necessarily involve a commitment to morals being eternally and inalterably fixed. There might be facts of the matter about what the right thing to do is that are sensitive to context. That doesn't mean we are ultimately forced to accept ethical nihilism.
But if you would like a discussion about evidence for ethical limits to human action, you might enjoy cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", where he discusses statistically significant correlations between statistics for violence in societies and the adoption of particular social values, and epidemologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level", where they chart a similar correlation for various indices of well-being in a society, such as physical and mental health, and argue for a causal mechanism in the distribution of income for the correlation they find.
So basically "You're not God, you can't convince me, therefore I can do whatever the hell I want".
Not all ethical realism is religious. You'd have both Ayn Rand and Sam Harris to side against here.
But yes, even if you're an ethical realist, you can do whatever the hell you want. You'd be wrong at least some of the time, and you shouldn't do the wrong thing, but you can still do it.
Yes, standing up against the abuse of power is standing up against particular uses of power while exercising power in doing so. No, that is not hypocrisy.
Exclusion is structure-relative. It doesn't make sense to talk about excluding people when there's nothing in particular you might take to be what they are being excluded from. I am not claiming here that people should be shunned from society or humanity or what have you because they are putting forward a statement of intent to exclude people; I am simply saying they are wrong. Excluding others from our lives for our perceptions of them being wrong would leave a very lonely society indeed.
It is precisely because we do not want to exclude that we challenge, in order to resolve the disagreement rather than seeking separation. Perhaps this disagreement may never be resolved, but that does not mean that the challenge should cease.
Oh, ffs, the reason you don't make category-targetted jokes like this isn't because it causes offense (it does, and people are entitled to be offended, but that's neither here nor there), but because it's a pointed act of exclusion. Some people are offended by my use of the term "ffs", and that's fine, they are right to be offended, and I'm being offensive here for a reason. But I'm not in the process of making this point telling those same people that they're not welcome in this discussion. Approvingly presenting a product about staring at women's chests in a technology conference very much is.
If we're calling people what they really are, then "The Powerful" seems to be a better description.
There's more blood on the hands of those at the top of private industry than the elected officials.
It's maybe a silver bullet in another sense - nuclear fuel still needs to be mined, which means a new kind of geopolitical conflict over precious resources. It would probably solve a whole lot of problems, but as long as the means to distribute nuclear power remains in the hands of interested parties in our current energy market, we don't have the global social infrastructure needed to carry out that solution. And as long as we do have the infrastructure we have at the minute, it just means more Iraqs lie on the horizon.
I don't think that's how the law works; you need to respond to violations of the law in ways that are themselves covered by the law. You can't say "oh, it's the police, they got the bad guy, so no foul". In order for law to be consistent and generally trustworthy, there needs to be due process written to cover responses to legal violation.
Let's Play is not some kids having fun for a bit of extra pocket money. Consider the case of PewDiePie, who has earned $4m from his Youtube channel recording himself screaming over footage of video games. That's one user.
If it is to be treated as a breach of copyright, it is of a notable and large scale, and Nintendo have every right to step in to protect their developers' creations.
When you buy a CD, you don't also buy the rights to use the music on that CD as the soundtrack for that movie you're making for general distribution. The scenarios seem parallel to me.
Hardly seems objectionable that they might take what's owed them for the work that they put in to actually make the content that people are profiting from. Hey, it's a massive improvement on the music industry: No, we're not going to sue you or other people who use what you've made publically available, or even take your material down; we'll just take the advertising money you'll earn from this point on..
I use a popup blocker, a flash blocker and Mozilla's "Do not track" feature. I don't mind if your webpage has advertisements at the side of the page or if I need to click through a brief commercial message after 5 seconds to get to the content I want to see, but stop throwing flashy movies at me, creating new windows and watching where I'm surfing. These are the tools of malware authors! I shouldn't have to make myself vulnerable to abuse just to help keep your website up and running.
How very poetic. Now let's be cold, mechanical and logical for a second and try to extract a falsification condition here.
On one side, we have the thesis that human brains are disposed to see particular patterns in the world. This is something that Cognitive Neuroscience investigates in considerable detail. We are gradually mapping out the structure of the brain, but are doing so through a process of experimentation and peer review, and with the aid of technology that we've developed to let us look in more detail at what is going on at a variety of different scales.
On the other we have... what? The inductive generalisation from the fact that we see the same numbers and fractal sequences in several different places to the suggestion that these things are just transcendental guiding laws of reality? What would it take to prove that statement wrong? I can present all sorts of things that happen that have nothing to do with phi, fractals, symmetries or the number 23; will this invalidate your assertion?
There is a place for mystery, for the appreciation of aesthetics and patterns and for theology. But metaphysics must hold itself to higher standards than "moving you to tears of joy".
The End-game of capitalism is Fascism anyway. By reducing political involvement to voting as a form of consumer confidence, people become used to the idea that Government is something that is provided for you, rather than something you have to actively participate in and contribute to. Whether the existing public sector evolves to adapt, or whether it gets surpassed by the private sector providing the infrastructure requirements, in the end, taxation becomes payment for services, the public sector adopts corporate hierarchy structures that retain people with "success-first" mentalities, and ideology becomes driven by factors that the markets take to be essential values.
That's not an argument against dropping IP laws. But what's the driving reason? If you're worried that it's a block to Free Capitalism, then you're right to be worried, but wrong to think IP has anything to do with it.
The Tory party aren't the lesser of two evils; they're in the top three or four of about 20 evils (EDL and BNP being obvious winners in that list). Why not vote Green, UKIP or Independent? Or, alternatively, the SNP/Plaid Cymru?
The only wasted votes are those that go to parties that don't need them.
'The apparent convergence towards a unique network shape in the temporal limit suggests the existence of dominant, universal mechanisms governing the evolution of these structures.'"
And the suggestion is intelligent design has guided subway design, but their list could include other items like... subways are underground. subways have stations. subways have purpose built trains. subways have ticket, coin, or other payment systems.
Again, "The Existence of Dominant, Universal Mechanisms Governing" is just the way philosophically naive academics say "There are relevant matters of fact concerning". What's with this rush to accuse people of practicing theology?
I'm starting to worry about the apparent inability of people to tell the difference between positing factivity and being religious. Either it's an expressive problem on the part of researchers or a lack of interpretive charity on the part of readers, but either way, it doesn't bode well for public science.
"The Existence of Dominant, Universal Mechanisms Governing" is just the way philosophically naive academics say "There are relevant matters of fact concerning". I wouldn't read too much into the way this has been phrased.
An obvious point of clarification is needed in the way this has been reported. "Religious Belief", as has been posited, is belief with respect to the existence of supernatural entities. But isn't Religion about collective belief, rather than supernatural belief? I would have thought "Theistic Belief" would have been a more appropriate target for the authors to address.
If Good requires Evil, then maybe we would be better off without both?
Just a thought. Especially if "Good" means "ridiculous amounts of legislation, overinflated security software pricing and a persistent universal mistrust of your fellow man".
Look, if you think there's no point asking what words mean, then this must be because you think it's obvious what words mean. Something to the effect of "we look at a dictionary". But what we're interested in is precisely what we should take the dictionary to say. I don't think this is a worthless question at all - it's maybe not the esoteric, "World-view forming" type question that people think "the meaning of life" should be, but it still seems valuable to be able to point to situations of correct and incorrect word use for the sake of understanding what everyone is saying.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a fact of our particular social situation, and about the research surrounding how social situations shift and change in response to equalities of representation. "Absoluteness" doesn't come into it. Or, indeed, anything claiming any kind of legitimacy to scientific practice. Such a vague word, "absolute", don't you think?
That's not what I said, but if believing that's what I said makes you feel better, then fine.
It wasn't about making me feel better. It was a correct interpretation of what you said. You stated, specifically, that in any case other than that in which I am a God that decides absolute correctness, you conclude that ethical judgement is simply subjective - by which, on the standard reading of subjectivity in ethics, you take it that it is decided by individual people for themselves. By which, you must, logically, include yourself.
As regards "absolute" morals, I'm not really fussed. Factive ethics is more than good enough for my point to get off the ground, and as mentioned above, that position is well supported by the statistical research of some excellent investigators.
You don't need to argue that people are free to avoid criticism, or even possibly medically motivated intervention, in order to argue that they ought not to be excluded from society. There is a hidden premise tying these things together, which says that societal exclusion is acceptable, perhaps even mandated, punishment for those who refuse to take responsibility for themselves. For the most part, the evidence of our prison systems says that this premise is plainly mistaken.
Do you have evidence that absolute morals exist?
Who said anything about "Absolute" morals? Being an ethical realist doesn't necessarily involve a commitment to morals being eternally and inalterably fixed. There might be facts of the matter about what the right thing to do is that are sensitive to context. That doesn't mean we are ultimately forced to accept ethical nihilism.
But if you would like a discussion about evidence for ethical limits to human action, you might enjoy cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker's "The Better Angels of our Nature", where he discusses statistically significant correlations between statistics for violence in societies and the adoption of particular social values, and epidemologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's "The Spirit Level", where they chart a similar correlation for various indices of well-being in a society, such as physical and mental health, and argue for a causal mechanism in the distribution of income for the correlation they find.
So basically "You're not God, you can't convince me, therefore I can do whatever the hell I want". Not all ethical realism is religious. You'd have both Ayn Rand and Sam Harris to side against here. But yes, even if you're an ethical realist, you can do whatever the hell you want. You'd be wrong at least some of the time, and you shouldn't do the wrong thing, but you can still do it.
Yes, standing up against the abuse of power is standing up against particular uses of power while exercising power in doing so. No, that is not hypocrisy.
Exclusion is structure-relative. It doesn't make sense to talk about excluding people when there's nothing in particular you might take to be what they are being excluded from. I am not claiming here that people should be shunned from society or humanity or what have you because they are putting forward a statement of intent to exclude people; I am simply saying they are wrong. Excluding others from our lives for our perceptions of them being wrong would leave a very lonely society indeed.
It is precisely because we do not want to exclude that we challenge, in order to resolve the disagreement rather than seeking separation. Perhaps this disagreement may never be resolved, but that does not mean that the challenge should cease.
Oh, ffs, the reason you don't make category-targetted jokes like this isn't because it causes offense (it does, and people are entitled to be offended, but that's neither here nor there), but because it's a pointed act of exclusion. Some people are offended by my use of the term "ffs", and that's fine, they are right to be offended, and I'm being offensive here for a reason. But I'm not in the process of making this point telling those same people that they're not welcome in this discussion. Approvingly presenting a product about staring at women's chests in a technology conference very much is.
If we're calling people what they really are, then "The Powerful" seems to be a better description. There's more blood on the hands of those at the top of private industry than the elected officials.
It's maybe a silver bullet in another sense - nuclear fuel still needs to be mined, which means a new kind of geopolitical conflict over precious resources. It would probably solve a whole lot of problems, but as long as the means to distribute nuclear power remains in the hands of interested parties in our current energy market, we don't have the global social infrastructure needed to carry out that solution. And as long as we do have the infrastructure we have at the minute, it just means more Iraqs lie on the horizon.
I don't think that's how the law works; you need to respond to violations of the law in ways that are themselves covered by the law. You can't say "oh, it's the police, they got the bad guy, so no foul". In order for law to be consistent and generally trustworthy, there needs to be due process written to cover responses to legal violation.
Let's Play is not some kids having fun for a bit of extra pocket money. Consider the case of PewDiePie, who has earned $4m from his Youtube channel recording himself screaming over footage of video games. That's one user. If it is to be treated as a breach of copyright, it is of a notable and large scale, and Nintendo have every right to step in to protect their developers' creations.
When you buy a CD, you don't also buy the rights to use the music on that CD as the soundtrack for that movie you're making for general distribution. The scenarios seem parallel to me.
Hardly seems objectionable that they might take what's owed them for the work that they put in to actually make the content that people are profiting from. Hey, it's a massive improvement on the music industry: No, we're not going to sue you or other people who use what you've made publically available, or even take your material down; we'll just take the advertising money you'll earn from this point on..
I use a popup blocker, a flash blocker and Mozilla's "Do not track" feature. I don't mind if your webpage has advertisements at the side of the page or if I need to click through a brief commercial message after 5 seconds to get to the content I want to see, but stop throwing flashy movies at me, creating new windows and watching where I'm surfing. These are the tools of malware authors! I shouldn't have to make myself vulnerable to abuse just to help keep your website up and running.
How very poetic. Now let's be cold, mechanical and logical for a second and try to extract a falsification condition here.
On one side, we have the thesis that human brains are disposed to see particular patterns in the world. This is something that Cognitive Neuroscience investigates in considerable detail. We are gradually mapping out the structure of the brain, but are doing so through a process of experimentation and peer review, and with the aid of technology that we've developed to let us look in more detail at what is going on at a variety of different scales.
On the other we have... what? The inductive generalisation from the fact that we see the same numbers and fractal sequences in several different places to the suggestion that these things are just transcendental guiding laws of reality? What would it take to prove that statement wrong? I can present all sorts of things that happen that have nothing to do with phi, fractals, symmetries or the number 23; will this invalidate your assertion?
There is a place for mystery, for the appreciation of aesthetics and patterns and for theology. But metaphysics must hold itself to higher standards than "moving you to tears of joy".
Maybe this is just because we use the same neural mechanisms we think with to phrase scientific theories and build models of networks? Just a thought.
If it's just an extra charge, it's not a Tax. Tax is imposed by Law. Get it Right.
End Game == Fascism.
The End-game of capitalism is Fascism anyway. By reducing political involvement to voting as a form of consumer confidence, people become used to the idea that Government is something that is provided for you, rather than something you have to actively participate in and contribute to. Whether the existing public sector evolves to adapt, or whether it gets surpassed by the private sector providing the infrastructure requirements, in the end, taxation becomes payment for services, the public sector adopts corporate hierarchy structures that retain people with "success-first" mentalities, and ideology becomes driven by factors that the markets take to be essential values.
That's not an argument against dropping IP laws. But what's the driving reason? If you're worried that it's a block to Free Capitalism, then you're right to be worried, but wrong to think IP has anything to do with it.
The Tory party aren't the lesser of two evils; they're in the top three or four of about 20 evils (EDL and BNP being obvious winners in that list). Why not vote Green, UKIP or Independent? Or, alternatively, the SNP/Plaid Cymru?
The only wasted votes are those that go to parties that don't need them.
*Adds "omnishambles" tag*
Again, "The Existence of Dominant, Universal Mechanisms Governing" is just the way philosophically naive academics say "There are relevant matters of fact concerning". What's with this rush to accuse people of practicing theology?
I'm starting to worry about the apparent inability of people to tell the difference between positing factivity and being religious. Either it's an expressive problem on the part of researchers or a lack of interpretive charity on the part of readers, but either way, it doesn't bode well for public science.
"The Existence of Dominant, Universal Mechanisms Governing" is just the way philosophically naive academics say "There are relevant matters of fact concerning". I wouldn't read too much into the way this has been phrased.
An obvious point of clarification is needed in the way this has been reported. "Religious Belief", as has been posited, is belief with respect to the existence of supernatural entities. But isn't Religion about collective belief, rather than supernatural belief? I would have thought "Theistic Belief" would have been a more appropriate target for the authors to address.
If Good requires Evil, then maybe we would be better off without both? Just a thought. Especially if "Good" means "ridiculous amounts of legislation, overinflated security software pricing and a persistent universal mistrust of your fellow man".
Look, if you think there's no point asking what words mean, then this must be because you think it's obvious what words mean. Something to the effect of "we look at a dictionary". But what we're interested in is precisely what we should take the dictionary to say. I don't think this is a worthless question at all - it's maybe not the esoteric, "World-view forming" type question that people think "the meaning of life" should be, but it still seems valuable to be able to point to situations of correct and incorrect word use for the sake of understanding what everyone is saying.