And what if ethics is the study of morality, i.e. the study of the rules of interpersonal behavior wrt rights.
The point is that immoral/evil action will have negative consequences for the parties involved, even if the person doesn’t know/agree that he is in fact acting immorally. When a king debases his currency he is acting immorally, and we know this because of the consequences of his action. The point is that the actions are grounded in the real world, and are subject to real/natural laws which have definite consequences. Separating ethics from the real world and making it a purely subjective judgment isn’t new. This position is often supported by leftists and nihilists.
We all have our opinions about what is good and what is bad, but the real world either confirms our condemns our beliefs.
If you mean by “wrt rights”, universal, absolute, objective rights, then I don’t see what the difference would be…
The absurdity heuristic is useful in a very rough sense but is insufficient in countering more in depth analysis like that presented by lilburne. The absurdity heuristic can even lead to what are, with hindsight, absurd results. For example, we can easily imagine a great ancestor of yours posting on an ancient internet forum that criticisms of the luminiferous aether were wrong precisely because it necessitated rejecting as useless the volumes of discourse that assumed its existence.
You can apply the same reasoning to most of theology, metaphysics and ethics. To quote Stirner:
“Just as the schoolmen philosophized only inside the belief of the church; as Pope Benedict XIV wrote fat books inside the papist superstition, without ever throwing a doubt upon this belief; as authors fill whole folios on the State without calling in question the fixed idea of the State itself; as our newspapers are crammed with politics because they are conjured into the fancy that man was created to be a zoon politicon, – so also subjects vegetate in subjection, virtuous people in virtue, liberals in humanity, etc., without ever putting to these fixed ideas of theirs the searching knife of criticism. Undislodgeable, like a madman’s delusion, those thoughts stand on a firm footing, and he who doubts them lays hands on the sacred! Yes, the “fixed idea,” that is the truly sacred!”
Lil,
You’re a very interesting psychological case study. I’ve taken some classes and read some as this was my second major, until I changed it a couple years into school. So I’m not talking from a baseless, uneducated assumption here. But is this to prove a point? Like you can’t give in to anybody or else you fail type of mentality even on a trival thing like taking off my quote in your OP. I mean if you’re this tyrannical when it comes to something so trival as erasing a quote, then it only is a hop, skip, and jump to how you are when it comes to bigger things in life, like do you want fries with that sir?
It does not have a truth value in the sense that ‘this yellow is zxacious’. It is conceptually meaningless.
No, you wouldn’t. Mainly because you’re confusing objective in the ontological sense with objective in the epistemic sense. A lot of people make that mistake, so don’t beat yourself up over it.
If his goal was to promote general prosperity, then the consequences will show his action to be inexpedient. If his goal was to collect seigniorage, then the consequences may very well show his action to be expedient. Whether economically hurting the masses for one’s own benefit is immoral is a value judgment. Some may base their value judgment on the consequences of the act, others may base it on the nature of the act itself. Either way, it’s an individual judgment of value.
Who said or implied that it was? Certainly not me, given that I explicitly cited Hume in my OP.
Guilt by association?
I would refer you back to the discussion between you, me, and JosephBright regarding economics, physics and value statements.
That is to say that it is meaningless because morality (zxacious) is non-existent? Or is it rather because the whole sentence is just incorrect from a word-signification point of view?
All I can say is that this is pure nihilism; it rejects the real world and its laws, including praxeological laws. A good act is everywhere and always a good act. I can’t really defend natural law with you because I believe it stems from God, which is something you probably automatically dismiss. But there is constancy in the world, a natural order. We have rights, and when someone infringes on our rights, we react.
I don’t waste time with philosophy because it’s merely a reaction to religion. The enlightenment sought to explain natural order without appealing to God, but ended up merely replacing God with the scientific method. Once that was exposed as nonsense, philosophy turned to pure nihilism and denies things like causality.
Which praxeological laws?
And yet you’ve never been able to deal with those like me, who know that god is pure nonsense, and who do not deny causality, aren’t nihilists, etc.
So take up the challenge and defeat Lilburne. Defend natural rights, or concede the point.
I mean, I already addressed it in my initial post, but people become dissatisfied with immoral acts forced upon them, and as such, they react. Their reaction is praxeological, that is, they do so because they are trying to better their own position. The king who debases his currency, levies taxes without consent, or whatever, is acting immorally. The reaction to his immoral decree will be violent revolution, and his liquidation.
That someone does indeed regard something as right or wrong can be considered a fact ABOUT someone’s values. So insofar as a moral statement is an expression of those facts (as if someone said “that killing, in fact, is counter to my values”), it is meaningful. Insofar as it attempts to describe something beyond the conscience, mentality, etc of the moral agent and those who share the agent’s moral judgments, it is meaningless.
Ironically, I rarely see anyone argue morality’s relation to emergence.
The personal judgment is indeed subjective, but the real world consequences are not.
lolwut? I wasn’t aware nihilists en masse deny causality. Are you sure your not generalizing?
I ask mainly because none of those I’ve spoken with that could be considered nihilists (offline) haven’t denied causality. At best they have different interpretations of what constitutes the cause & effect, but I don’t see how that would inherently deny causality itself.
Not true. Philosophy is older than what you call ‘religion’ since you are probably talking about so called christianity. What’s more, christianity itself ‘borrowed’ a good deal of elements from paganism and classical philosophy.
Finally, the enlightenment was not specially atheist.
Anyway, there’s no reason to tie common sense morality to christianity, just like there’s no reason to pay attention to moral nihilists/moral relativists and their ivory tower theories.
Right, but you’re ignoring the unseen. The act of the person who forces the immoral act, the king who debases his currency etc. Those acts are all praxeological as well.
I don’t think you have made the case that any praxeological laws are violated by what Lilburne has introduced.
Morality assumes objective value exists, whether it be teleological with regard to a certain end or deontological with regard to certain actions. The value is assumed to be inherent in either the end or the action. (Even moralists who argue via epistemology IE Argumentation Ethics (assuming their reasoning is valid, which I don’t think it is) assume that self-contradiction is morally wrong.)
There is no good reason to believe that ‘objective value’ exists (or whether the conjunction is conceptually meaningful and can be clearly defined), as (I have argued in other threads) moral axioms can be neither verified nor falsified. First, to address a possible concern, I am not saying that propositions within a system of ethics cannot be falsified (if they can be shown to be inconsistent with the axioms of the system) but that the axioms themselves are in such a position.