There’s no distinction. Zefreak is an amoralist as so are you.
amoralist
noun
someone who adheres to the doctrine that ordinary moral distinctions are invalid
I can pick a certain definition & shape the dialogue too 
Odd, that last bolded part doesn’t seem to apply in the way you toss the term around here.
Okay, but I don’t think this changes or addresses the point at all. Why do men even need a concept of “good” and “evil?” What purpose does it serve?
I think that the latter part of what I quoted actually supports objective ethics. If there’s a neurological basis for empathy, neurologically-healthy humans must have a common conception of it, no?
To a certain degree yes, but to say that supports objective ethics is to commit the genetic fallacy.
Yeah, you know what ? I hacked this site and put that definition myself.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/amoralist
I’m so twisted and evil. I’m ‘shaping’ the dialogue by using a standard definition.
Exactly zefreak’s position. I take it you are not even reading this thread?
Zefreak is an amoralist who said
“Ok, just checking to see if there was any real disagreement between moral anti-realism and your own position. It seems there isn’t, and yet you have in the past rejected such a label.”
So, too bad if Lilburne and others deny being amoralists, but that’s what they are according to the dictionary.
Men don’t ‘need’ a concept of good or evil. It does, however, serve a purpose, namely shaping codes of conduct and directing behavior. It served enough of a purpose that groups of people who don’t have these norms didn’t survive the cultural selection process. We can also see the limited survivability that such people have today, if they refuse to cooperate with dominant norms.
That would be committing a naturalistic fallacy. Ethics makes greater claims than ‘this is what people believe and how people act’. Plus, lets say I’m not a neurologically-healthy human (healthy is a teleological concept that I reject, incidentally. Who is this ideal human to which we all aspire? Mencken has a great article on this point). How am I bound to this morality that is apparently necessitated by neurology? I don’t have it. It has no claim on me.
Conceded.
However, zefreak is the only one who has yet addressed my primary line of questioning. What purpose does your code of values serve? Why do you have one?
Give me more than a second, please. I am responding to multiple people here.
What makes surviving a desirable end?
I’m inclined to agree with your thoughts on the concept “healthy.” I made a mistake in picking that part of your earlier post as some form of support for objective ethics. It was more of just an interesting thought.
I was pointing out that you did respond, where others have yet to do so.
OT: The notification emails I’m getting about this thread are arriving out-of-order. It’s extremely annoying. Is anyone else having this problem?
Why would the agent undertake the action (remember: action = purposeful behaviour) if they did not believe the expected outcome would suit their ends, i.e. not result in disutility/psychic losses?
Also more generally, Arg. ethics is an epistemic framework. If you don’t like it, don’t follow it. Won’t make any difference since all it does is aim to invalidate other theories thereby neutralising them… by showing them to be logically inconsistent.
Also, hai KoB! Missed you, keep up the good work! ^^
If someone asks for a quote to be removed, please don’t be discourteous… and remove it.
Sorry, what do you think posting this link achieves ? http://lesswrong.com/lw/np/disputing_definitions/
Survivability is a desirable end to me, and I don’t pick my ends, only my means. It is a generally desirable end for most people, but I in no way presume it to be universal.
So “exclusive control” is your definition of property, and the theory of how one comes to justly achieve exclusive control over property is through homesteading? And how does that refute self ownership? How does the below not say anything about “political” ethics?
"if a person A were not the owner of his physical body and all goods originally appropriated, produced or voluntarily acquired by him, there would only exist two alternatives. Either another person, B, must then be regarded as the owner of A and the goods appropriated, produced, or contractually acquired by A, or both parties, A and B, must be regarded as equal co-owners of both bodies and goods.
In the first case, A would be B’s slave and subject to exploitation. B would own A and the goods originally appropriated, produced, or acquired by A, but A would not own B and the goods homesteaded, produced, or acquired by B. With this rule, two distinct classes of people would be created—exploiters (B) and exploited (A)—to whom different “law” would apply. Hence, this rule fails the “universalization test” and is from the outset disqualified as even a potential human ethic, for in order to be able to claim a rule to be a “law” (just), it is necessary that such a rule be universally—equally—valid for everyone.
In the second case of universal co-ownership, the requirement of equal rights for everyone is obviously fulfilled. Yet this alternative suffers from another fatal flaw, for each activity of a person requires the employment of scarce goods (at least his body and its standing room). Yet if all goods were the collective property of everyone, then no one, at any time and in any place, could ever do anything with anything unless he had every other co-owner’s prior permission to do what he wanted to do. And how can one give such a permission if one is not even the sole owner of one’s very own body (and vocal chords)? If one were to follow the rule of total collective ownership, mankind would die out instantly. Whatever this is, it is not a human ethic.
Thus, one is left with the initial principles of self-ownership and original appropriation, homesteading. They pass the universalization test—they hold for everyone equally—and they can at the same time assure the survival of mankind. They and only they are therefore non-hypothetically or absolutely true ethical rules and human rights." - (Hoppe intro to TEOL)
That’s right, it’s not analogous. And no, there is no key commonality between the two. Since Rothbard, did not in fact go for "universal absolute, objective values", beyond political philosophy, i.e a “political” ethic as described above.
And I don’t see how you have at all shown that a rationalist axiomatic-deductive objective ethics (within political philosophy obviously) is chimeric.
And yet that doesn’t refute anything, it only serves to back up what was previously said.
"In economic and political questions, in contrast, ethical and value conflicts abound and permeate society. It is therefore impermissible for the economist or other social scientist to act as if he were a physician, who can generally assume complete agreement on values and goals with his patient and who can therefore prescribe accordingly and with no compunction. Since, then, praxeology provides no ethics whatsoever but only the data for people to pursue their various values and goals, it follows that it is impermissible for the economist qua economist to make any ethical or value pronouncements or to advocate any social or political policy whatsoever.
The trouble is that most economists burn to make ethical pronouncements and to advocate political policies—to say, in effect, that policy X is “good” and policy Y “bad.” Properly, an economist may only make such pronouncements in one of two ways: either (1) to insert his own arbitrary, ad hoc personal value judgments and advocate policy clearly on that basis; or (2) to develop and defend a coherent ethical system and make his pronouncement, not as an economist, but as an ethicist, who also uses the data of economic science. But to do the latter, he must have thought deeply about ethical problems and also believe in ethics as an objective or rational discipline—and precious few economists have done either. That leaves him with the first choice: to make crystal clear that he is speaking not as an economist but as a private citizen who is making his own confessedly arbitrary and ad hoc value pronouncements.
Most economists pay lip service to the impermissibility of making ethical pronouncements qua economist, but in practice they either ignore their own criteria or engage in elaborate procedures to evade them. Why? We can think of two possible reasons. One is the disreputable reason that, if Professor Doakes advocates policy X and basically does so as an economics professor, he will be listened to and followed with awe and respect; whereas if he advocates policy X as plain Joe Doakes, the mass of the citizenry maycome to the perfectly valid conclusion that their own arbitrary and ad hoc value judgments are just as good as his, and that therefore there is no particular reason to listen to him at all. A second and more responsible reason might be that the economist, despite his professed disbelief in a science of ethics, realizes deep down that there is something unfortunate—we might even say bad—about unscientific and arbitrary value judgments in public policy, and so he tries desperately to square the circle, in order to be able to advocate policy in some sort of scientific manner."
While squaring this circle is impossible, as we shall consider further, I believe that this putative uneasiness at making arbitrary value judgments is correct. While it is surely admirable (ethical?) for an economist to distinguish clearly and carefully between the value-free science and his own value judgments, I contend further that it is the responsibility of any scientist, indeed any intellectual, to refrain from any value judgment whatever unless he can support it on the basis of a coherent and defensible ethical system. This means, of course, that those economists who, on whatever grounds, are not prepared to think about and advance an ethical system should strictly refrain from any value pronouncements or policy conclusions at all. This position is of course itself an ethical one. But it relates to the ethical system that is the precondition of all science; for, even though particular scientific laws are themselves value-free, the very procedures of science rest on the ethical norm of honesty and the search for truth; that norm, I believe, includes the responsibility to lend coherence and system to all one’s pronouncements including valuational ones. I might add in passing that anyone conceding the necessity of honesty in science ipso facto becomes willy- nilly a believer in objective ethics, but I will leave that point to the ethical subjectivists to grapple with. 2
- (Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy by Murray N. Rothbard. The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics, Edwin Dolan, ed. (Kansas City: Sheed and War, 1976), pp. 89-111; The Logic of Action One (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 78-99.)
Furthermore the use of “bad” and “good” are essentially robbed of their meaning.
"Yeager advocates a utilitarianism of the variety articulated by Ludwig von Mises in Human Action. The normative terms good and bad make sense only in the context of society, and something—be it an action, law, or ideology—is morally good only insofar as it promotes human happiness or satisfaction. Because of the nature of human interaction—a nature discovered by the positive economist as well as other scientists—social cooperation is the means by which individuals satisfy their diverse, subjective ends, and thus ethical issues can be reduced to the expected strengthening or weakening of social bonds. In short, what promotes cooperation is good, what hinders it is bad.
..
The fundamental problem with utilitarianism is this: Despite a succession of ingenious proponents, its advocates have yet to explain why the individual should behave morally. The fact that we are all better off if we all behave morally is utterly true and utterly irrelevant. (Such an argument violates the cherished Austrian precepts of marginalism and individualism.)
…
Utilitarianism seems to rob the words good and bad of their specifically ethical character. The utilitarian cannot make a distinction between guilt and simple error. The person who robs a bank to achieve happiness has made a mistake in qualitatively the same sense as a person who overcooks a steak.
In fact, we can go further. Is it really true, for example, that Josef Stalin acted against his interests, even in the long run? Does the utilitarian really concede that our possible condemnation of Stalin is purely an empirical matter? (It might be true that had every other Soviet acted in his true interests, dictatorship would have been impossible. But this is dodging the issue.)" - Murphy
Yes, an actor does X because he thinks that X will benefit him. I don’t dispute that. I’m only saying that description is a tautology of sorts that doesn’t add anything useful to the discussion.
I wasn’t attacking argumentation ethics. As a matter of fact I subscribe to some variety of it =P
Sorry, I must have misread.
Juan: “Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language. Dictionary editors find words in current usage, then write down the words next to (a small part of) what people seem to mean by them. If there’s more than one usage, the editors write down more than one definition.”
Dictionary definitions of philosophical terms are notoriously sketchy. You know both mine and Lilburne’s views, we expressed them in more detail than your dictionary definition is capable of doing.
To the first point, it’s an implication of action being purposeful behaviour. People who invoke it often try to say that all action is rational, ergo none may be ethically scrutinised. The issue here is conflicting depths of rationality rather than the accuracy of Mises’s dictum… to the latter, it was a general comment.