I read this book so I thought I came across it before:
“Action is, by definition, always rational. One is unwarranted in calling goals of action irrational simply because they are not worth striving for from the point of view of ones own valuations.” - Mises; Epistemological Problems of Economics
edit: Let’s say for sake of argument Mises is wrong or meant it another way, etc… Somebody that is doing that kind of math has rationalized that 2+2=5. The truth or falsity of something isn’t necessarily based on that is their rational or way of reasoning. Anybody could provide a reason or try to reason anything. That ability has nothing to do with whether or not they are being true or false.
^different uses of the term rational. Liberte used it to mean logically consistent. I think we all agree its just semantics. Makes me barf.
That still wouldn’t make morality true - at best there might be consistent strategies that are better, that doesn’t mean you should say failing to follow these is ‘evil’.
Since I don’t think most of you actually know me, basically I deal (in real life) with strangers with an Edwardian-bordering-on-Victorian politeness and apparent respectfulness. I don’t lie (except to the government) and I haven’t physically injured anyone who didn’t try to injure me first since I was like 4. I have stolen random objects worth a few cents, but I don’t really make a point of it. I once reported overpayment from my employers.
I do these sorts of things because I find organize social systems and the sorts of people attracted to them to be the best sort to deal with for the attainment of my ends. Just as I’ve said that, aside from being a reactionary with no truck for libertarian morality, I do quite like your little schemes for market societies. But I feel no need to either rationalize these preferences or to try to claim that others ‘ought’ to share them, usually even if I think they would share them if they understood I don’t bother because it’s not worth the trouble of explaining things like World War 2 and protectionism.
I have no taboos. That doesn’t mean my behaviour is arbitrary. In fact, I am if anything Lawful Evil. You can trust me with your money, your credit card number and your house keys. What you can’t trust me with is your good looking husband 
The notion of “good” contains “ought” statements, so you haven’t bridged any gap at all. You’ve started with an “ought,” and you are deriving other “oughts” from it. (Which is perfectly legitimate, just realize that you are doing this)
No, you need more than that. The existence of ‘god’ doesn’t imply any kind of morality. For divine law theory to work you have to derive your morality from the law of God. This has to revealed by communication from God; namely, scripture.
I have no problem with your cosmological argument at this point. I’d have to look into it more to see if it actually works. But the fact remains that the proposition “God exists” does not, in and of itself, imply a code of normative ethics. Read the paragraph on ethics in this article: http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=218
I don’t know what’s going on with the forums here. I have to put in all the html code manually. I hope it works…
I still am having a hard time wrapping my mind around your position. I agree almost wholly with your last post but then the Lawful Evil comes and throws a loop: “Examples of this alignment include tyrants, devils, undiscriminating mercenary types who have a strict code of conduct, and loyal soldiers who enjoy the act of killing.” Question: If you were 100% guaranteed never to be found out, would you kill twenty random people for the egoistic purpose of finding out how it would feel?
Z.
What you are doing is ditching the name “morality” but then just explaining the same thing. Sure, most people see “morality” as a sort of absolute, objective type of thing. Many people even reject “utilitarianism” and “consequentalism” as not even about “morality”. Probably the reason that most people see it like that is because it is easier to just program every one to accept these things as ‘dogmas’ than it is to try to prove it with arguments referring to connections between means and ends. But at the root of morality is a nexus of means and ends, whether people understand that or not.
When I said that “morality” is just a set of guidelines, what I meant was that what “morality” impels you to do is generally what “suits [you]”, anyway. Why else would it evolve, considering that each of us are the “survival machines” of genes, things which are, as replicators, “selfish”? What the hell do they care about other people, anyway? Often, Dawkins says things like that we are “rebelling” against the “tyranny” of our “selfish genes” by enacting societies in which we care for the weak, help out the poor, care about what happens to strangers, et cetera. He claims, furthermore, that a society run on the principle of “darwinism” would be a “ruthless” place to live. What he is missing, of course, is that we do live in such a society! Why else does he assume that we got to this point? How else could we explain how we got here? A few quotations from Mises will suffice to give a much more plausible explanation of what is happening than the empty hypostatization that we randomly started rebelling against our ‘creators’ and created “morality” out of thin air.
First of all, the myth that, by caring for the ‘weak’ or ‘sickly’, we are “deteriorating” our ‘gene pool’, is pretty ridiculous. Letting people like that die would not be more ‘darwinian’ than what we are doing now. What people who make that argument are doing is just comparing people adjusted to one type of life to that of an other. But what makes one better than the other?
Second of all, the reason why we care about strangers, help people, feel compassion, have friendships with people, et cetera is because of the division of labor, because their gain is our gain and their loss is our loss. We do it for ourselves despite whatever most people say. Again, why else would it have appeared?
The result of seeing morality as a sort of absolute, objective type of thing is that you start to believe that you should be able to apply it to things other than what it was ‘designed’ to handle as input. For example, people often try to apply it is the question of how we should treat animals. We see wildly different and erratic views here probably because our morality is not meant to deal with these things. Our affinities with other mammals, like the fact that the structure of young making them look ‘cute’ is similar between us and other mammals, is one of the factors here; it makes people start to feel like these things are like other humans. What other explanation should we give for the unbelievable phenomenon of the people who say “yeah, I am a vegetarian; I eat fish sometimes, though”? Why the hell is fish not called “meat”? That happens simply because fish are so much different that us; we have barely any affinities with them; and these people want to still call themselves “vegetarians” although it is plain that they are eating animals, too, not just plants. A quotation from Mises basically ends this ridiculousness of people questioning whether animals have ‘rights’:
From that, it is easy to see that asking whether animals have ‘rights’ is a phantom question. They are not a part of the division of labor, they are just means, like any other thing. We only have two choices. Either we let them ‘go their own way’ or we coerce them into our processes of production. So how does it make sense to ask whether or not they have ‘rights’? ‘Rights’ are of the office of morality; and morality appeared because of society, which, in turn, appeared because division of labor is more productive than isolated labor and people were able to ‘discover’ this fact.
What makes this post so hard for me to write is that I basically agree with what you are saying. The only difference is that it appears that you are trying to be inflammatory and sensational. You are not discarding morality any more that Mises was discarding it. And you even admitted that you act like you care about morality and manners. Perhaps that is because you do?
What “make[s] morality true” for most people is that to keep society working well is consistent with their interests in the long term. What our moral sentiments are are short-hands; they are the conclusions of calculations of our subconsciousness regarding how we should treat others; they are advisements from our subconsciousness. But we have all sorts of subconscious calculations that we rely on; why is morality so special? Our emotions, and even our faculty of taste, are subconscious calculations, too. For example, on one hand, fear advises us to get out of whatever situation that we are in, and, on the other hand, taste advises us whether we should eat whatever we are tasting or not.
If “morality” just refers to the conclusions of the calculations of our subsconsciousness regarding how we should treat others, it is a psychological phenonenon. (Of course, praxeology tells us why it appeared; it appeared because treating people like that, based on the past experiences of our species in society, furthers our own interests.) But, if “morality” refers to more than that, refers to our doctrines of how to treat other people, based on conscious thought, it is a question that has an answer, one which we may figure out only if we heed the teachings of economics, among other things.
To ignore morality in the first sense and just listen to your ‘reason’ is as insane as ignoring your emotions or tastes and just listening to your ‘reason’, which is insane indeed. If you plan to ignore your moral sentiments and just rely on your reason, why not do that with taste? Maybe you should forget about how things taste; for, of course, those are just the dumb recommendations of your subconsciousness, a thing too erratic to trust! You should just do research in the natural sciences to see what is best for you and then ingest it, whatever sorts of reactions your subconsciousness has to your decisions.
You are just a part of a long tradition of people who elevate ‘reason’ to the highest of levels and put emotions, passions, and other advisements of your subconsciousness on the lowest:
But you are not ignoring “morality” in the second sense. You are embracing that indeed.
Snowflake,
Due to my lack of HTML skill I’ll attempt to respond to you without quoting.
On the God is good, he created therefore the creation was created good I was a little sloppy. If one says God is THE good, basis of all good, and would act in accordance with his nature he would create a good universe.
On relativity I am aware that the General theory best explains a lot of observed phenomena I do though believe the theory to incoherent since you have to smuggle in objective reference points to make any sense. My physics is a little ropey but I would venture that a theory based on energy rather than forces but keeping a similar method to that of Neweton’s would ultimately make most sense and make sense.
Anyway the need for objective time is philosophically necessary and is logically prior to any empirical work.
On the Kalam cosmological argument I was only giving the general title for the argument and nothing you’ve said lays a single glove on my interepretation of it. All you’ve said that infinity has no ontological grounding which I was agree with and I showed the absurdity of it. Hence the only conclusion to come to is that time came into being and all that it implies- a timeless being acting. I suppose you could say that we are actually originally timeless and we brought things into being although it’s manifestly absurd.
z1235,
I’d say that action and time were synomous. The initial action brought time to be.
Jesse,
Saying that God IS good is not an ought statement; that would be God ought to be good. It is saying that something IS good. It would seem you are rejecting the possiblility of objective references to good without “divine law” by assertion.
The article you linked has a rather crude view of divine law. The examples of not being allowed to eat pork and then allowed to do so do not invalidate in any way natural law. To see this all you need to do is split divine law into positive and natural law- the latter are inviolate manifestations of God’s character such as not murdering the innocent and the former as those commands he sees fit to impose on his own creation for purposes of his plans. Now you could say his plans are determined by his nature but if you can have any notion of freedom for God this must be rejected.
Btw are you a Van Tillian? For the record theologically I’m a relatively conservative open theist.
Physiocrat: “I’d say that action and time were synomous. The initial action brought time to be.”
But therein lies the problem. Time was necessary for the action of creating it to have occurred. God needed time to perform the action of creating time. Now, of course, you can answer that God, in his mysterious ways (miracle!) was able to initiate an action (creating time) without the existence of time, but that will put us at the typical ending of every God discussion. They all start calling for reason and logic but inevitably devolve into pleadings for faith.
Z.
So are you essentially saying conception of ex niliho creation is incoherent? Also I’m not saying he created time directly merely it was a by product of action- where there is action there is time.; he need not create time and then act. One could say that action is logically prior to time but that they are temporally equal.
Let me use an analogy. For a flourishing economy one needs law and order services however to fund one though requires the economy. So it must be the case that the economy and the provision of law and order are symbiotic.
“Due to my lack of HTML skill I’ll attempt to respond to you without quoting.”
I thought my HTML was okay but it says I misquoted you and blocked my post… Must have messed up the punctuation/spacing somewhere… theoretically you’re supposed to type [ quote user=bobby ] (no spaces on the ['s)
“If one says God is THE good, basis of all good, and would act in accordance with his nature he would create a good universe.”
Thats a big and speculative if. You might as well have said god THE X, therefore the universe is also X. I also disagree with this logic because good is usually taken to mean a quality about someone’s character or action. I don’t think it makes sense to say something is “the essence of good” any more than I can say something is “the essence of blue”.
Its circular anyway isn’t it? I ask you what is good you say “god”. I ask you what is god you say “good”… it explains nothing.
“On relativity I am aware that the General theory best explains a lot of observed phenomena I do though believe the theory to incoherent since you have to smuggle in objective reference points to make any sense. My physics is a little ropey but I would venture that a theory based on energy rather than forces but keeping a similar method to that of Neweton’s would ultimately make most sense and make sense.”
A priori there’s no reason that time can’t be looped. It is not forbid by conservation laws, and the second law of thermo is probabilistic.
“Anyway the need for objective time is philosophically necessary and is logically prior to any empirical work.”
So? We could just be wrong in our assumptions even if they lead to some useful results.
“All you’ve said that infinity has no ontological grounding which I was agree with and I showed the absurdity of it.”
Actually I disputed that something has to be created in order for it to exist. The notion of something coming into existence is bunk. We have never seen it. We can never describe it.
“Hence the only conclusion to come to is that time came into being”
Again you’re asking at what time did time start. Its nonsensical.
"it implies- a timeless being acting’
Action - cause and effect - requires time. Also you gain no properties of god out of this. Why can’t the universe have been timeless and then, like your god theory, created time in some wierd unfathomable unknowable way? I can’t continue on this vein because its so far beyond the limits of speculation its ridiculous. Simply let me point out that if you think that the universe was caused by god, and that god was either timeless or self causing, why can’t the universe just be self causing/timeless?
@Liberte (God damn quoting mechanism isn’t working)
From your last post I would say that you do have moral principals, even if you don’t think you do.
You clearly recognize that there are facts about the world which affect your quality of life, and you probably act on that most of the time. Politeness, Honesty, and such things clearly serve you. I think ethics would the the logic (or art whatever) of finding those virtues.
I don’t understand why amoralists, in particular stirnerites, dismiss descriptive ethics so quickly. (Ought from an If). I find that people would be a lot better off if they thought about those issues.
Perhaps is because most stirnerites don’t believe in metaphysics… Not sure.
“Again you’re asking at what time did time start. Its nonsensical.”
It’s completely reasonable really. In fact, scientists believe that it occurred around 13.5 billion years ago.
“why can’t the universe just be self causing/timeless?”
This question is completely nonsensical. The universe is the object to be explained. To say that it created itself is to say nonsense.“The universe” is just a series of contingent objects, that is, objects which are caused. The very existence of the universe begs a question which, for whatever reason, is forbidden amongst most intellectual circles. And if something can create “the universe,” then this something is not bound by space, time, or physical natural laws. This something resembles what some men call God.
“I am here shamelessly stealing Hilbert’s hotel. Imagine a hotel with a countably infinite number of rooms, all of which are occupied. Then a new customer arrives. One may think there would be no room, but all that needs to happen is to move the guest in room 1 to room 2 and the guest in room 2 to room 3 etc and one can accommodate a new guest. This process can continue with every new guest who arrives. So we have a situation in which all rooms are occupied but we can still accommodate new guests; it is both full and not full at the same time. Put it another way (sorry, the symbols are messing up): (infinity) + 1 = (infinity) Which makes sense due to the potential nature of infinity. Yet if it is actual too, we can do this: (infinity) - (infinity) = 1 Therefore 0 = 1 Slightly odd to say the least. Thus we must conclude that time began from which it follows that a timeless being brought it into existence. You could then argue who made God, but the regression ends at the beginning and the timeless being must be without beginning.” (emphasis is mine)
This is awesome by the way. Thank you. Also, 0! (0 x 0) = 1.
Physiocrat,
The contingency argument is just a silly semantics play. I see “God” as the proverbial dumpster into which the religious throw whatever humanity hasn’t yet learned or comprehended.
Ancient Greeks observed that every standing object must be supported by another object or else it would fall to the ground. So who/what supports the “Heavens” then? Well, Atlas, of course – who else?
Today, you say that everything must be contingent on (caused by) something other than itself. So who/what created the “first” non-contingent action/thing? Well, God, of course – who else? Silly me. ;^)
Z.
“It’s completely reasonable really. In fact, scientists believe that it occurred around 13.5 billion years ago.”
And simply because you can trace an x-coordinate back to the origin you believe that this is where it started? There’s no evidence for this. Like I keep saying, “creation” is a bunk word. We have never observed anything being ontologized.
“This question is completely nonsensical”
Why? Its the same as the religious claim save that “the universe” has replaced the word “god”.
“The universe is the object to be explained. To say that it created itself is to say nonsense.” I agree, but only because I think that this sort of ontological creation is nonsense. I was simply pointing out that if there can be a god outside time, there could also be a universe outside time. Consider that time stops inside black holes, yet their mass persists. I.e. it is “timeless”.
“This something resembles what some men call God.”
If you’re going to call the unknowable “god”, then you’re just adopting a semantics convention to prove your point.
“The contingency argument is just a silly semantics play. I see “God” as the proverbial dumpster into which the religious throw whatever humanity hasn’t yet learned or comprehended.”
Completely dismissing/mocking an entirely logical and sound argument is not a refutation. Anything within the universe can be known through logic and the various methods employed by the natural and social sciences. The cosmological argument does not deal with such questions; it answers the question atheists don’t want to ask.
“Ancient Greeks observed that every standing object must be supported by another object or else it would fall to the ground. So who/what supports the “Heavens” then? Well, Atlas, of course – who else?”
Non sequitur. The Greeks were wrong, and science proved them to be wrong. But science cannot answer this question (not will not, but cannot). Logic tells us that something must have caused what we call “the universe” (since we must rule out infinite regression or that it (everything) created itself). That’s all it tells us.
Many atheists (not you necessarily) seem content to repeat, ad infinitum, that theism (and deism) is a fairy tale, and that theists believe in fairy tales (not a refutation). I guess if you repeat something enough, enough people begin to repeat it.
“Today, you say that everything must be contingent on (caused by) something other than itself. So who/what created the “first” non-contingent action/thing? Well, God, of course – who else? Silly me. ;^)”
Would it make you more comfortable if I called it Bob, or delta, or what about geist?
What if all of the matter were just always existent? Why did an act of creation have to occur?
I. Ryan,
That’s a good question, but at the moment Astronomy says otherwise due to cosmic microwave background [CMB] (temp. ca. 3 K), Type I supernova’s (which do not need Hubble’s constant), Hubble’s constant, a general prediction of Grand Unified Theories, inflationary implications and observed ripples in CMB, and some other things. Astronomy has gone into great depth already in providing tremendous answers to such questions. Olbers’s paradox, for one, says why the night sky is dark because if the line of sight in the sky at night were infinite then only one bright light (the whole sky) would be oberved as star light would all be intersecting upon each other. But since this is not happening then the line of sight in the night sky is finite. Now if you mean that matter is constant and only implodes upon itself and then expands again in other words the universe comes and goes, comes and goes, from singularity to expansion and back again over and over. That’s possible, but that’s also what is meant by universe dying and creating.