Monkeybot

Well, I disagree.

(Hey, apparently it's acceptable as a rebuttal, along with "Is not!")

idiom

If moral duty to the society exists then why do we go so for such a long time between wars of conquest?

In regard to extent, should a war of conquest be undertaken regardless of the odds, or is there an equilibrium point where benefit to society balances the negative affects on your society?

Also, which is the best way to sort which society you are compelled to duty for first? Does your family come before the state or, the Globe before your country?

On the suicide idea, historicaly many societys have included suicide as moral duty for soliders who lose. I do believe that in some societys at least, one could be physically compelled to ritually kill yourself. Or at least psychologically.

If you are physically compelled to kill yourself is that suicide or are you being murdered? Point being is compulsory suicide possible?

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: idiom ]</p>

Bill Snedden

That may well be...

Um....No. Bentham & Mill did indeed premise their Utilitarianism on pleasure, however later proponents such as G. E. Moore have formulated the principles differently.

Regardless, the irony remains: Utilitarianism is, at heart, a collectivist view of morality. Exactly as you are espousing.

I stand corrected (in part). Society may indeed be seen as organic, but I would argue not in the manner in which you seem to believe. Your viewpoint seems to be that humans exist to serve society, where I would argue the reverse.

However, I stand by my earlier statement that the human body is an indivisible whole. Conceptually speaking, when one thinks of a human body, it possesses certain attributes: a head, a torso, two arms, two legs, a heart, a brain, etc. We cannot separate any of these attributes without either abandoning our description of the body as "human" or amending our description to include a catalogue of the differences ("handicapped" springs to mind).

But not irreparable damage as in the case of heart or brain removal. The cases are simply not analogous.

What is "the good of the whole?" You suggest that individual members of society exist to convey some type of collective benefit. However, if this is true, there must be some recipient of this benefit. Who might that be? Using your argument, it cannot be any individual member of the society, but neither can the society benefit unless the individuals do.

How does one resolve this paradox?

Interesting! Above you assert that the "body" analogy is apt, yet here you seem to admit that it is flawed. Which is it to be?

How can humans be "obviously expendable" is they are different in important ways? Obviously a human who is more important than others is not as expendable as those others. Exactly who are these "expendable" humans? I feel sure that you would not count yourself among them...

Regardless, as there are without argument many, many parts of the body that are not "obviously expendable", indeed, that are not expendable at all, yet again it is demonstrated that your analogy is flawed.

Well, no, not quite. I do not believe in libertarian free will, which I would categorize as impossible. However, limited free will is compatible with determinism and hence compatible with methodological and metaphysical naturalism.

Besides which, if you truly believe yourself unable to reason then why do you bother posting these "arguments?" Don't you see the obvious self-contradiction you've created?

I can "prove" it quite easily:

P1) That which sustains the life of Man is good, that which hinders it is evil.
P2) In order to live, Man must have the ability to choose his own path.
P3) Slavery restricts Man's choice.
C1) Slavery is evil.

Q.E.D.

Of course, whether or not the argument is sound is another issue entirely (but you didn't ask for that...).

In all seriousness, I simply can't accept without proof that you yourself believe what you posted. Prove to me that you've sold yourself into slavery or retract your assertion.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Bill Snedden

This may take us somewhat off-topic, but I can't resist...

That is somewhat true, but if one has no moral duty to others, then there is no way to discuss limitations on that non-existent duty (which was my point).

I should have been clearer in my meaning. When I said that one has no moral duty to others, I should have said that one has no moral duty to others simply because they are there. IMO, moral duty or obligation to persons other than ourselves only exists because we create it or place ourselves in a position that creates it (and that includes becoming or remaining a member of a society).

Your parent-child example demonstrates this clearly; by having a child, the parent assumes a moral responsibility for the well-being of that child. One does not assume, by default, a moral responsibility for all children simply because they exist.

This surprises me; I would have thought that most people would argue that a parent is morally obligated to "sacrifice" his/her life for their child. Indeed, even as an ethical egoist I would be hard-pressed to find an example where I would not argue the same.

IMHO, taking on the role of parent carries an awesome moral responsibility. I would argue that a parent is morally obligated to do everything within his/her power, up to and including giving up his/her own life, to guarantee the safety of his/her child.

About the only circumstance I can imagine that would justify a parent's refusal to offer her own life for the life of her child would be one in which the parent's act would not guarantee the safety of the child (and there would be a reasonable chance they might both end up dead).

Even so, I agree that it is unlikely that any responsible parent would not so act, regardless of moral compunction.

I disagree. If one believes, as we both seem to, that individuals are ends in themselves, and not means to another end, there seems to me no other way to derive a system of morals but from individual values.

I would argue that it is the "collective good" that is an illusionary contrivance. If I like chocolate and you like vanilla, what is "the collective like?"

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Gurdur

It's better than :banghead: with Trebaxian
Which I disagreed with, and you yourself have come to disagree with, at least in your original formulation; therefore my comment.

heh, heh, we disagree once again; but I'm not going into this one, since it would take time, and we'ld simply come to different voluntarily-held premises. No way to debate; simply a choice one way or t'other.

I disagree again. Same as above.

heh.

Pardon me, since you're an intuitionalist.
You confuse feeling with moral - a bit more later.

Why ?
Just because you feel that way, doesn't make it a moral.
Better said, it may be your moral, but it's a subjective one.

heh, what happens if you have more than one child, and are put into a situation where it's one child or you ? Then the same, but the other children may become endangered.

*sigh*
Bill, you should know by now I'm not terribly inexperienced in these things.

This is in disagreement with your own self-refering teleological stance regarding individuals - more later in this post.
IOW, you contradict yourself.

Feeling is a powerful thing.
Rightfully so, or else all humans would be extinct egotists.
Emphasis on extinct-

heh, heh, heh.
We don't agree.

Better said, you have stated you believe you think
"humans are ends in themselves"
but
you've backtracked and would seem tio think
"parenting humans exist for children"
which is already a huge difference.

Moreover, it all depends what you mean by "ends".
You took one meaning, I took another.

I can best illustrate the difference by saying in cotradiction to you,
Humans are things in and of themselves

But it would be pure ideology on your part - see below.

Paid taxes lately ? Part of your tax money went to supporting a kindergarten you yourself or your children will never use ? A highway ? A national park ?

If you want to see these things as illusionary, it will be difficult for you.

99Percent

YesYesYesYes, yes, and yes... The sweat of my brow is not an illusion

Gurdur

whereas, of course, Objectivism is.
The more dogmatic, the more illusory.
________________

Bill Snedden,

I believe you grasp my point.

Let's move on a bit:

Part of the philosophical problem here is:

You can say something is a moral,
simply because a significant number of people believe that it is, and adhere to it. That allows for differing morals, just as there are differing groups of people.

However, you cannot say something is the moral --- i.e. exclusive, and the only choice around.

There can exist mutually competing and sometimes contradictory morals - in fact, the existence of competition is guaranteed by evolutionary psychology; and the existence of mutually contradictory morals is strongly predicted by evolutionary psychology
(just why is one of my long, long excursive discourses)

Futhermore, I made a short comment regarding your unconscious teleology --- if you start saying
"humans are ends in themselves"
and you mean by "ends" an unconscious goal,
then you start deriving all srts of odd, odd things.

On a biological level, humans exist as long as they produce other humans. They don't need to, but they won't be around long if they don't.

Humans exist - period. An individual exists - period.
A human does not exist for the sake of himself/herself or for the sake of society -
a human exists, period.

Then given the strong moral biases built into us by evolution, plus our perverse cognition, and away we go developing our moral systems.

Interestingly, most people alive today recognise some kind of social responsibility; i.e., most people believe in both individual and social morals. And that after 150,000 to 270,000 years of humans being around.
Or IOW, Darwinistic cultural evolution seems to be selecting for social morality as well as for individual morals.

idiom

So those who attack the fabric of morality should be removed for the betterment of society?

You could've headed up the inquisition!

Bill Snedden

A choice certainly, but is there truly no way to decide which choice is better? If we choose a standard, say a desired outcome, there should certainly be a way to determine which choice of ethical basis will more likely allow us to reach that desired outcome.

What would you say is the desired outcome of setting and following moral standards? Why do we need a code of ethics?

You misunderstand me. I was surprised because you did not argue differently based upon your feelings, not because I believe that feelings are always an appropriate guide to morality.

Apparently I misunderstood you as well...


When did I ever mention feelings? My argument is not at all based upon feelings.

Would you agree that a person is morally obligated to make every reasonable effort to fulfill a promise?

A person who voluntarily chooses to parent a child has committed himself/herself to the care of that child, with everything that entails. Not because I feel that it should be so, but because I have a moral obligation based upon my promise (commitment).

Well, of course the complete context must be taken into account.

This is not a question that poses any more or less difficulty for ethical egoism than for any other meta-ethical theory.

Why do you assume that I might believe otherwise? What in my response leads you to assume that I underestimate the level of knowledge you believe yourself to have?

Even the wisest man can still be mistaken...

This is apparently where you think I've contradicted myself, but I assure you that I haven't.

A "parenting human" (as you put it) has made a choice that having a child fulfills his/her wishes. In other words, such a person has decided, based on his/her own needs, that such a choice will allow him/her to meet his/her own goal (end).

So, the choice to "exist for children" was made by them, for their own purpose, and therefore is still a choice to further their own end. No contradiction at all.

But these are quite beside the point. I expressly indicated in my initial post that I recognize that some of the choices we make to further our own ends may carry necessary societal obligations: "...moral duty or obligation to persons other than ourselves only exists because we create it or place ourselves in a position that creates it (and that includes becoming or remaining a member of a society).

I'm going to add my responses to your second post here:

Really? What if it is the only choice around? What if the only alternative is death?

I suppose one could argue that death is a choice, but it's certainly not an attractive one in most circumstances.

Can we agree that, absent extraordinary circumstances like extremly painful terminal illness, "life" would always be a choice preferred over death? If so, wouldn't that meet, for all practial purposes, the description of "the only choice around?"


Let's please not turn this into a repeat of your debate with Metacrock!!

However, I have to wonder. With survival being the "goal" of all evolutionary activity, I would think that a rather convincing argument could be made that such a process leads ineluctably to a reliable inter-subjective standard, rather than competing standards, and that the inference of "competing morals" from evolutionary competition for survival is fallacious.

While there are certainly many, many instances of competing survival strategies, how many mechanisms exist by which these strategies are devised? IOW, isn't there a common tool used by humans to figure out all this stuff? And, regardless of the strategy we may employ, don't we all have a common goal? Why can't the existence of a common goal and a common method of determining how to reach it give us grounds for common ethical standards?

By "ends" I don't mean unconscious goals, I mean conscious goals.

I don't agree. My initial existence was brought about because my parents made a choice to reproduce, but my continued existence is not automatic. IOW, I don't simply exist because I exist; I must take action to ensure that my existence endures. But how do I know what actions to take? I must make choices on which actions will best guarantee my survival and prosperity, but in order to do so, I must have some standards against which I can evaluate my choices. Those standards must be based both upon what it physically takes to survive, and the reason for which I desire to continue to survive (my goal, or "end").

Those standards are my code of ethics. I submit that the common goals all humans share (the desire to live and to prosper) can provide us with common inter-subjective values upon which an ethic can be developed.

Certainly, but do your really believe that those (individual and social morals) are two separate things? My argument would be that they are in fact the same, or rather that they have a common basis.

Why should we need or desire them to be separate?

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Keith Russell

Absolute Embodiment of the Idea:

I am in no way part of your 'we'.

Keith.