No. But you cannot treat it - emotionally, mentally, ethically - as “just another action” because you are hardwired to experience certain feelings in response to gratuitous infliction of suffering on other human beings. I suppose if you killed or tortured enough people you could learn to overcome the reflex but the point is that you’re fighting gravity.
Clayton -
And I would say that is not uncommon, looking back at human history. People kill all the time, and more often than not it’s for money. Now, my guess would be that bloomj31 has never gunned someone down, and I think he admitted that he might wimp out in reality. But for the sake of argument, he is sticking up for the fact that killing the Africans to get the diamonds provides a material gain. Since he is a person who tries to act for his own immediate benefit, he could see himself killing the Africans if there were no risk of being caught and arrested. I don’t think this makes him a psychopath, just someone with practical values instead of moral values. Bloom is worried about breaking the law and getting arrested - most psychopaths are not, I think. And my instinct is that bloom has more morals than he’s willing to admit on this forum. People can’t just say “I don’t care if I murder someone” and make it true.
On the other hand, I agree with most of your arguments against bloom because my ideology is much closer to yours. But it just seems like you’re not getting anywhere. If bloom ever changes his mind, it won’t be because of the arguments on this forum.
A>Murder is just an act (like theft), people can attach any moral significance they want to it, but it’s an act like any other.
B>No, people cannot attach any moral significance to it. Moral evaluations are subjective but they are not arbitrary.
Yes they can. Deal with the logical conclusions of your own theory.
Can people hold any taste preference they wish? Is the “distastefulness” of battery acid a purely arbitrary artifact of cultural conditioning? Or does battery acid taste bad for a reason?
Clayton -
"But those things benefit me, I desire to be alive, I like being entertained. People, in and of themselves, don’t do anything for me. I have no reason to care unless they do something for me. What good are these Africans to me?
I mean when I really think about it, you people are asking me to act against my own interest to preserve some moral principle I don’t care about. That doesn’t make sense. Explain to me why it’s in my interest not to kill these people in the example and I’ll change my answer. What do I gain by letting them live?"
If you don’t care about that moral principle, it is of course not in your interest (you might be a sociopath then; or just not perceive those people as human beings). However, most people do, just as they get satisfaction from eating or watching TV, they also get satisfaction from being righteous and just as they get dissatisfaction from being bored or hungry, they get dissatisfaction from harming people they perceive to be innocent human beings.
Then there is another reason for people who don’t care to still behave in a moral way and that is of course fear for retribution of others. But there are many situations where people can find ways to harm other people and still get around retribution. But if everyone would try to kill everyone else at every chance they have if they think they won’t be caught, a society could not really exist and that is why to have a at least semi-peaceful society, humans needs some kind of moral code.
Looking back at history, some psychopath usually gets into power and then makes the system do what he wants.
We’re not trying to deny that there’s material gain. There’s nothing to stick up for.
The point of the hypothetical was that to bloom, there is no downside to killing people if you can get away with it. To use the terminology Conza brought in, he suffers no psychic loss from murder.
No. Psychopaths are charming and good at blending in. Some of them do go on murderous rampages, but they are the exception.
This is true. But to the best of our knowledge, he has displayed psychopathy.
Sorry, that’s bs. Utilitarianism is value-free, yes. But that means completely value-free. It doesn’t care about the validity about any ends, it just takes these ends as data and tries to find means to accomplish it. Whether those ends are to help mankind, to be as rich as possible, to torture animals; that is completely irrelevant for praexological utilitarianism. It does not judge ends, it gives advice as to how to achieve them.
Clayton you presented a misleading materialist analogy. Your analogy doesn’t apply - you fail.
It is a fact that some people like to murder ofther people. Your opinions about that kind of personal preference are totally irrelevant and ‘unscientific’.
“As a humanist, I find such an attitude disgusting and immoral.”
Ok, and I don’t really care what you think because I have no reason to.
“he suffers no psychic loss from murder.”
I think what I said is that the diamonds are worth the psychic loss to me.
"Clayton you presented a misleading materialist analogy. Your analogy doesn’t apply - you fail.
It is a fact that some people like to murder ofther people. Your opinions about that kind of personal preference are totally irrelevant and ‘unscientific’."
There are probably also some people that don’t dislike the taste of some poisons or people who don’t have the ability to “taste” at all. Most people do however. I don’t really see your point though, there are obviously many people on this world who have a preference for moral behavior, who get satisfaction from helping others. If you don’t care about morals at all, then you obviously have different ends. I think it is silly and pointless though to try and argue against someone else’s values (that is: the direct ends that lead to satisfaction which is the ultimate end). Just like you will never convince me that tomatos taste good, you will also never convince me that mass murder is not a bad thing.
“because you are hardwired to experience certain feelings in response to gratuitous infliction of suffering on other human beings.”
I agree. But with reason, I can learn to negotiate with those feelings. I don’t think killing the Africans would make me feel good, but getting the diamonds would. I’d take the temporary feelings of dissatisfaction with the act to get the diamonds.
In other words, part of me will always feel a little bad for doing things that are programmed to feel bad, but as long as I can get something that’s worth a lot to me for doing those things, I’ll do them, provided I think I can get away with them.
In this scenario, I’ve been promised totally legal immunity.
EDIT: Just wanted to point out that I’m not killing in this scenario just for the sake of killing, I’m doing it to get diamonds.
Clayton you presented a misleading materialist analogy. Your analogy doesn’t apply - you fail.
It is a fact that some people like to murder ofther people. Your opinions about that kind of personal preference are totally irrelevant and ‘unscientific’.
I don’t like the analogy either, but we can readily understand general categories of exchange as either voluntary or involuntary, and this is divorced entirely from “personal subjective preference”.
That’s not necessarily true since those categories are not really self-evident. But even if they were, your remark is beside the point.
You can’t switch from ‘value-free’ to ‘value-laden’ as you please. In a so called ‘value-free’ analysis ‘crime’ is just one more arbitrary action which can be useful or not (from a personal/subjective point of view)
Sure, it really does depend on what is worth more to you, diamonds or conscience. And if you’re sure that you will neither feel too bad about it, nor have to fear punishment or other negative effects, it might be the ratioal decision. However, you seem to imply that you try actively to make yourself care less. I don’t think that this is (utilitarian-wise) a good idea. Firstly, you might recognise the chance that you could fail to negate your conscience, that at a later point you will for some change of heart or whatever feel bad for what you did. And then you could also try to change your values in a way that increase your enjoyment-capabilities that does not conflict with other people (in the mentioned example that does not seem very important, but in reality you always have to fear that you will be punished for hurting other people) for example by trying to care less about stuff like diamonds, etc; being happy without being super rich.
Personally, I don’t try to use rationalisation on myself either in a moral nor in a materialistic sense. I’m quite happy with my personality and try to improve my knowledge (especially praexeological, both in principle and in practise), my material well-being and all the other ends that I gain happiness from. That is in my view, especially long-term, the to me most utlilitarian stance to take. It protects me from retaliation for earlier wrong-doings, from my own conscience and provides me with good tactical knowledge on how to best achieve happiness.
It doesn’t need to be, it’s describtive. It doesn’t try explain reality, it merely has an analytical purpose.
Well, this is a discussion forum so perhaps you could do me the favor of explaining why you think this is the case.
There are a very small number of sociopaths who seem to either derive pleasure from killing and torturing other human beings or are at least indifferent to it. Such individuals are extremely rare and a great deal of research suggests that there is actually something wrong with the brains of most such individuals.
Most murders are not committed by sociopaths, however. Most murders are committed by motivated individuals against their enemies. Such actions tell us nothing about the individual’s taste or distaste for murder in any absolute sense, it only tells us that they preferred killing their enemy to letting him or her live, whether or not they found the act of killing enjoyable in itself.
I find a great deal of parallelism between ethical sentiment and taste preference. Maybe there are some bizarre individuals who enjoy the burn of a little drop of sulphuric on their tongue but we would immediately recognize this as a disorder because such behavior is dangerous and potentially deadly. The reason sulphuric acid tastes bad is exactly that it is potentially deadly, that is, we have evolved a taste for most substances which are not deadly and a distaste for most substances which are deadly. In other words, there is a reason why humans have the taste preferences they do. Similarly, there is a reason why all people except sociopaths find the act of killing or torturing another person - or even witnessing killing or torture - unseemly, disconcerting and immoral. Since there is a reason why we have such dispositions, they are not arbitrary.
Clayton -
Fri. 10/05/21 16:00 EDT
.post #100
[url=Rand Paul...don't ever Stall Again, Stand Up For Private Property Rights - #95 by bloomj31]
Perhaps, but this is a far cry from saying “everyone.” The number of these “so many people” might actually turn out to be a small fraction of the total population.
True for certain “somethings” and some people, perhaps, but not necessarily true for other “somethings” and other people.
I think this is absolutely wrong. In my opinion, what “gives grounds for such behavior” is the pervasive belief that social programs (to use your example) are a “right.” To corroborate this, we can think of all sorts of examples of people demanding a certain thing, frequently in open defiance of the law, once the idea takes hold that what they are demanding is “rightfully” theirs.
This is precisely why soldiers are able to murder innocent people during foreign invasions: because they believe that they are morally justified in doing it, that it is their “patriotic duty,” that they are “defending their country,” that they are “doing God’s work,” etc. It is moral propaganda that their heads are filled with, because it is the moral argument that is most persuasive, and to the most people. If recruitment offices merely said “Hey, join the army and you’ll get to murder people without having to suffer any legal consequences,” I strongly suspect that their success rate would suffer significantly.
Disagree with you there, just because there is a reason, doesn’t mean they are not arbitrary (depending on your definition of arbitrary of course; there is also a chemical reason why sociopaths want to or do not mind killing other people). The reason (at least if you’re not making a religious argument, but I don’t think you are) for those taste-preferences is of course that they have worked (not that they actually work which they might but which is also irrelevant, but that they have worked in the past or at least come into existence and not vanished again as to still exist in the present). That doesn’t mean however that a move away from those tastes is somehow “objectively wrong” or anything like that. Killing innocent people is for me subjectively wrong and it is in both my moral and my material interest that murderers of such innocents are somehow stopped and punished (so that I get a positive feeling about my subjective evaluation of “justice” having come out on top and because living in a society that keeps criminals from hurting me and the people I care about serves my material interests). If you did not try to make the assertion of absolute morals, just disregard my post.
People who murder other people are ‘sociopaths’. For instance, the millions of people who compose the armed forces. They kill other people in cold blood when ordered to. Oh of course, whoever the military kill is by definition an ‘enemy’
Anyway, whether the amount of ‘sociopaths’ is big or small is irrelevant (and the context has not been specified either). I thought we were discussing the logical implications of your ‘moral subjectivism’.
I’m sorry that you apparently don’t understand the implications of your (wrong) parallel but it’s not my fault.
lol - lots of poisons are tasteless or the effective dose is tiny making them practically tasteless. You see, materialism is boring…
Actually the idea of soldiers as cold hard warriors is a little hollywood. In firefights, most people are useless. People are scared shitless of being killed, and don’t really want to kill someone else, so why pop up and shoot? I remember reading that it took somewhere on the order of magnitude 3000 bullets to kill one person in war. Although poor aim probably has a lot to do with it too.