neither/nor wrote:
And it is not establishing the facts that impales us in coordinating our behaviors nearly as much as deciding which order the facts should unfold in.

So the factual question of what it takes to be a human is NOT an important point of difference in debates about abortion?

Thus I suspect your fervid commitment to Kant [and philosophy] is a psychological one. A run of the mill defense mechanism.

How exactly does following the categorical imperative or whatever count as a defense mechanism? If it's too abstract to support any concrete thinking, it wouldn't be able to concretely reassure us, would it? Unless mumbling philosophical jargon pleases some vague aesthetic part of us? But now if it DOES admit of meaningful application to life, then if it offers us some comfort thereby, it does so realistically.

Ditto for philosophy in general. Either it doesn't comfort us or if it does, it does so reasonably (where reasonably means whatever we've decided it does).

The principles behind the moral law behind the ethical view. And yet even with those principles in place the moral laws and the ethical views ever clash ferociously century after century after century. Not very practical are they?

What if the problem is that the principles are NOT in place because humanity has corrupted itself? That's no less than potentially true, I'd say.

Mary is a social animal and so she must think in terms of right and wrong behavior. And that is because others will leave her no choice. And that is because her behavior has consequences for others. But there is a difference between saying Mary ought to do this or that because it is philosophically sound and Mary must do one thing or the other because she will be judged either way.

But here again you illustrate that the attitude you're criticizing is not the same one Kant, et. al. refer to when they call actions "right" or "wrong." For me, even if I were totally alone in the universe and the only one able to evaluate my own choices in that situation, what I did would still be justified or not.

neither/nor origtinal post:

Once we acknowledge [the deeply existential, problematic nature of the relationship between moral values and behavior] we can concentrate more on moderating our views and aiming to negociate our differences into legislation that is bursting at the seams with all the compromises necessary to accomodate different sets of value judgments. Only then will we be willing to moderate our behaviors in turn.

szavieur wrote:

You've yet to explain how this would actually work, though. What would values-free arguments about human action sound like? Why moderate our views? Why not assume that I don't know what's right or wrong for society, but I do know what's right or wrong for me, and just go with that?

But I have. I have directed folks attention to court rulings and legislation that come from branches of the U.S. government year in and year out. In particular, legislation revolving around issues like abortion. It has tended to land somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum between all abortions being punished and no abortions being punished.

And this is not a value-free process. It is a process that tries to balance the values of those on all sides of the issue. Democracy, in other words. The alternative would be a world in which every woman who has an abortion is judged to have acted immorally [and maybe even arrested for murder] or one in which any woman who chooses an abortion is not questioned about it at all.

And, sure, if you as an individual want to believe that all abortions are either moral or immoral, that all behavior facilitating abortion is either moral or immoral, fine. But you are the extremist, right?

And over and again I ask the moral extremists to evaluate in depth how they have come to reduce these behaviors down to either/or. I ask them in turn to investigate in depth the manner in which their life unfolded existentially such that their experiences and relationships predisposed them to one point of view rather than another. And how, should a circumstantial landslide occur in their own life, those views can change dramatically.

You refuse to delve into the arguments behind dasein, however. Why? Because, in my view, it disturbs you that you may, yourself, begin to recognize the dasein in you.

Then your carefully crafted philosophical I might come crashing down.

neither/nor original post:

Judgments are made BY "persons". Not by rocks or trees. Perhaps we should discuss in some depth what an impersonal judgment might be.

szavieur wrote:

No, it's not relevant to our argument.

That you refuse to acknowledge just how relevant it is that A person passes judgment on behaviors embedded in A particular circumstantial context from A particular existential vantage point as dasein is, in my view, the measure of just how wide the gap is between us and Kant. How interesting it would be though to have Kant read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. Then come back to Duty and Obligation. Not to mention Marx, Freud and Wittgenstein.

Remember, what I mean by knowledge and obligation are some things I *can* readily be conscious of in their entirety.

Yes, just as, say, what Marx meant by bourgeois, proletariat, revolution and dialectical materialism allowed him to be readily conscious of the knowledge necessary to advance the historical cause of political economy.

Unfortunately, millions upon millions of folks paid the ultimate price for that philosophical folly.

But then millions upon millions have also paid the price when they got in the way of Ayn Rand's own philosophical juggernaut as well.

But Kant is different, isn't he? After all, the Nazis who embraced him completely missed the point!!

And you say:

There's more to the content of our thoughts than information passively imposed on us by the flux of the external world. There's also everything we can imagine and conceive independently of experience. That is where my invariant moral understanding comes from.

I do not deny that Kant made valuable contributions to philosophy in going beyond the points Locke and Hume [among others] raised about the building blocks of the human mind. And a synthesis was needed to meld rationalism and empiricism such that it accommodated the real world more, well, realistically. But then Kant starts mucking around in a priori, noumenal and transcendental knowledge; and before you know it "concepts" like duty and obligation are melded in turn to potentially dangerous words like categorical and imperative. Ah, but moral evaluations of human behavior are not on par with material evaluations of the natural world. At least I don't think they are.

...if you'd like to start debating the epistemology of psychology here, fine. That debate I'm trying to provoke anyway by questioning your knowledge of the scale of human self-delusion.

The epistemology of human emotional and psychological states? Do you think that is possible? Where would we start in terms of a priori knowledge of THAT?!!

My own knowledge of "human self-delusion" starts with the assuption that, as a human being myself, I would be truly self-delusional if I were to insist I am the exception to the rule. Indeed, my point is more along the lines that the existential exceptions are the rule. But until you grasp my own take [delusions?] on dasein you will never understand where my arguments are heading. And they are heading in the general direction of deconstructing you. Or, more to the point, showing you how to do it yourself.

neither/nore original post:

Why don't you focus on one particular right or wrong.

Already done this like 4 times, I think.

Yes and, like, 4 times I have explained the difference between subjunctive psychologisms and more widely shared moral convictions about more widely shared experiences.

"Having an epiphany" presupposes there be something to have one about. But if there IS something to make some profound discovery about, then there is some relevant reality to be discovered.

But are you making the assumption that an epiphany necessarily leads you to something that transcends the phenomenal? Perhaps it just allows you to see it differently. Remember when Alan Greenspan testified before Congress about the epiphany he had regarding the free market self-regulating itself?

Have you ever had an epiphany that transcends phenomenal interactions with others? One, perhaps, that is not so personal I could never empathize at all.

you say:

Yeah, I've had "turning points" in my theoretical life. A lot of the time those involve paying attention to something I was already on some level aware of, though, not apprehending some new thing that dramatically renovates my thinking.

Please, more existential [and topical] meat on those bones, okay?

[Kant would] know you were a human, on Earth, with everything (maybe not very much, granted) those two facts imply about you. So he could pass some ambiguous judgment about you as that terrestrial man.

Lots and lots of people know I'm a human on earth. But as for what those facts imply about me, well, yes, their judgments too were rather ambiguous. That's my point you might say.

First, you describe the conclusions a person would reach about the value of life from an objective point of view, then you say this point of view is unavailable to us. So how did *you* just manage to pull off perceiving the inexistence of objective value?

Hmm...

Are you suggesting that just because I offer my own assumptions about the value of a human life, I am neccesarily implying I state this objectively? I sure don't. Again, all I can do is offer what I construe to be a meaningful assessment of human life given how my own subjunctive, actually existing life, has unfolded to date. And how I have come to understand what that means. Now, if you wish to insist this is me contradicting myself then, sure, go ahead. But this just takes us back to what we either can or cannot convey about human existence using language.

...my interpretation of the world strongly supports my belief in the inherent meaningfulness of life.

I have no doubt you believe this reflects an objective meaning. But if tomorrow an asteroid [The Big One] smashes into earth and wipes out all of human existence, what is objective about it then? Everything that humankind has ever thought, felt or done is gone forever. As though, cosmologically, it had never existed at all.

Is that a queasy, terrifying thought? Of course it is.

That is why the transcendental, the reality-in-self, the ontological and teleological hub in the middle of it all [which most folks call God] is so crucial. That bestows objectivity on everything doesn't it?

Kant, in my view, does the same thing for you. He offers a way to obviate the essentially absurd and meaningless nature of human existence.

Think of it like this: Because we die, life means nothing; and because we die life means everything. But Kant allows [some] folks to reconcile that with, uh, eternal truths?

But you say:

....when I think of life as having intrinsic meaning, I don't mean that the universe or God or whatever is going to protect it. I very well know, again, about the threat of universal entropy. What I'm saying by calling life intrinsically valuable is that to correctly represent the relationship between living and practical reasoning, I have to give very, very high priority to survival in that reasoning.

But one can easily come to substitute that reasoning for a God that does not exist, for a teleology behind the Big Bang that does not exist.

How else can one then arrive at, say, categorical and imperative assumptions about an alleged noumenal relationship between a priori knowledge, morality and human behavior. Like the rest of us you survive. And like the rest of us you want a way to render that meaningful.

But hey, different strokes, right? At least your own rationalizations are more intellectually sophisticated than denominational religion or New Age gobbledegook.

I'm personally familiar with extensive, severe pain coupled with life-taking pressure. Maybe it won't sound very unpleasant to you, but hearing the person you're in love with ****ing someone else, again and again and again, more times than you know to count, while this person asks you to "be his friend forever" or whatever, was... Well, I can testify, although not proudly, to nearly "breaking" quite a few times when dealing with that.


Okay, you survived this. You were able to mount a meaning underneath it that enabled you to pull through. But trust me: The pain can get worse. It can get a lot worse. And if some of the folks who have already committed suicide could be with us in this venue, I'm sure they'd have tales that would get us thanking our lucky stars for the Dr. Kervorkians of this world.

Now, I hope you never reach that point. I hope you die in your bed peacefully of natural causes.

But don't kid yourself that it can't go the other way. The pain can cripple you. You end it. And then from a cosmological point of view it too will be as though you had never even existed at all.

Not that I can know this, of course. But then neither could Kant, right?

neither/nor wrote:
That you refuse to acknowledge just how relevant it is that A person passes judgment on behaviors embedded in A particular circumstantial context from A particular existential vantage point as dasein is, in my view, the measure of just how wide the gap is between us and Kant. How interesting it would be though to have Kant read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus. Then come back to Duty and Obligation. Not to mention Marx, Freud and Wittgenstein.

But this still isn't what I meant. I'm not pretending to make impersonal judgments, here. The whole issue of whether they're possible is besides the point. —If Kant read Sartre, maybe he'd sound like Christine Korsgaard. I don't know. I know that I find in Sartre a nearly identical to Kant's abstract theory about right and wrong, even if not by name.

Yes, just as, say, what Marx meant by bourgeois, proletariat, revolution and dialectical materialism allowed him to be readily conscious of the knowledge necessary to advance the historical cause of political economy.

Unfortunately, millions upon millions of folks paid the ultimate price for that philosophical folly.

But then millions upon millions have also paid the price when they got in the way of Ayn Rand's own philosophical juggernaut as well.

But Kant is different, isn't he? After all, the Nazis who embraced him completely missed the point!!

No. The people who quote Marx or Rand to commit mass murder are just as misquoting as did the Nazis with Kant. Anyone who cites an abstract philosophy to justify political oppression is deluded.

The epistemology of human emotional and psychological states? Do you think that is possible? Where would we start in terms of a priori knowledge of THAT?!!

What, psychology is unjustified speculation, then?

My own knowledge of "human self-delusion" starts with the assuption that, as a human being myself, I would be truly self-delusional if I were to insist I am the exception to the rule.

So, without any proof, you've just decided that people often lie to themselves so systematically? Do you know that everyone rationalizes, etc., and if you do know this, how?

And they are heading in the general direction of deconstructing you. Or, more to the point, showing you how to do it yourself.

What is there to deconstruct? Some of the concepts I use? But none of your arguments to this point have been valid or sound enough to put a dent in my conceptual architecture. The best ones you have are aimed at positions I don't think I quite exactly take but which you've attributed to me based on a shared vocabulary (although not a shared semantics for that vocabulary).

Yes and, like, 4 times I have explained the difference between subjunctive psychologisms and more widely shared moral convictions about more widely shared experiences.

I'm not sure I *have* much in the way of (on my view) provable claims of right and wrong except which are extremely theoretical or extremely personal.

Have you ever had an epiphany that transcends phenomenal interactions with others? One, perhaps, that is not so personal I could never empathize at all.

Maybe that nonviolent resistance can be supererogatory is something I've epiphanized(?) and which is more than a purely private judgment.

Yeah, I've had "turning points" in my theoretical life. A lot of the time those involve paying attention to something I was already on some level aware of, though, not apprehending some new thing that dramatically renovates my thinking.

Please, more existential [and topical] meat on those bones, okay?

Okay, that the concepts of right and wrong are concepts of opposites, in which case to infer something's wrongfulness, it has to be shown that it cancels out something right. But what's right would be first verifiable in some other way. So, for instance, it's right for me to live if I don't set out to end the lives of others. That means it's wrong for other people to kill me.

I have no doubt you believe this reflects an objective meaning. But if tomorrow an asteroid [The Big One] smashes into earth and wipes out all of human existence, what is objective about it then? Everything that humankind has ever thought, felt or done is gone forever. As though, cosmologically, it had never existed at all.

Is that a queasy, terrifying thought? Of course it is.

How is that terrifying?

Kant, in my view, does the same thing for you. He offers a way to obviate the essentially absurd and meaningless nature of human existence.

Since you don't have any proof that life is absurd and meaningless... Maybe, again, you're talking about something else when you say "meaning" than when I say it.

How else can one then arrive at, say, categorical and imperative assumptions about an alleged noumenal relationship between a priori knowledge, morality and human behavior. Like the rest of us you survive. And like the rest of us you want a way to render that meaningful.

I don't know if I'm able to arrive at anything *you* describe as "categorical" and "imperative," but what I'm talking about when I call stuff that: it's fair of me to say that something is a categorical imperative despite my epistemic limitations. Again, the thing I predicate of actions in order to think of them as ethical is a thing that exists in reality and is straightforwardly able to be known by everyone in the world.

At least your own rationalizations are more intellectually sophisticated than denominational religion or New Age gobbledegook.

I don't know about New Age spiritualist manuals, but I *do* think a lot of religions are way more justified, even objectively, than they might be taken to be by a lot of others who tend to adopt a scientific evidentialist stance towards metaphysics, etc.

Okay, you survived this. You were able to mount a meaning underneath it that enabled you to pull through. But trust me: The pain can get worse. It can get a lot worse.

Unless you can prove this, I'm not going to just accept it. Not even as possible (how do you KNOW it's possible?). (I mean, I know of worse pain than I've felt, but I also know of people surviving it.)

neither/nor wrote:
I do not deny that Kant made valuable contributions to philosophy in going beyond the points Locke and Hume [among others] raised about the building blocks of the human mind. And a synthesis was needed to meld rationalism and empiricism such that it accommodated the real world more, well, realistically. But then Kant starts mucking around in a priori, noumenal and transcendental knowledge...

You can't affirm Kant's empiricist-rationalist merger while condemning the apriority involved in that merging.

Why do you think he blended noumenal considerations with ethics? For Kant, morality required free will and in particular the free will to do otherwise than one actually does. But that kind of power contradicts the general law of causality upon which the existence of specific laws of nature depends. So the phenomenal world's metaphysical structure stands diametrically opposed to the metaphysical structure necessary for morality (according to Kant).

This just goes to show again, as per your disagreeing with Erosopher on where the concept of morality comes from, that you're not actually addressing Kant or whoever when you say things like, "No one can KNOW what's absolutely right or wrong." For whatever you mean when you say that is quite different from what I would mean by the same sentence.

Again, all I can do is offer what I construe to be a meaningful assessment of human life given how my own subjunctive, actually existing life, has unfolded to date.

What if the entire world came into existence 5 days ago and everyone from that point on was infused with beliefs that it existed before then? What if everything is a hallucination or a simulation being run by entities possessing all possible information in the universe? What if we choose all our beliefs, even the nature of the world we have beliefs about, from our first moments of consciousness onward? Where goes us as "Dasein" then?

Okay, you survived this. You were able to mount a meaning underneath it that enabled you to pull through. But trust me: The pain can get worse. It can get a lot worse. And if some of the folks who have already committed suicide could be with us in this venue, I'm sure they'd have tales that would get us thanking our lucky stars for the Dr. Kervorkians of this world.

I'm sure a lot of people being tortured might want to die while in pain. But if they're being tortured, chances are they're under physical restraint and so lack the power to satisfy this desire. Now imagine they're gifted with the ability to commit suicide as if by an act of sheer thought. How do we know that the natural drive to live won't balance itself against the pain they're in and motivate this person to remain alive?

Ultimately, if doing the right thing exists, so does doing the wrong thing. Just because some people would give in to extreme agony and off themselves accordingly wouldn't make their decision justified.

erosopher wrote:

Do we have a priori knowledge?

"A priori knowledge" are word-sounds we invented to encompass something no one can actually point to---as one would point to this table or to that boulder. We can't take it out of our pocket and say, "look everyone, I have a priori knowledge here!"

Indeed, other than for philosophers who are attempting to rationalize the existence of an ontological table or a metaphysical boulder, it just doesn't work that way.

Obviously, there is "knowledge about the world" that is applicable to all of us. Mathematical and scientific assessments of "the natural world" that are as true in America as in Somalia, as true regarding men as women, as true in the 11th century as in the 21st century, as true for a socialist as for a capitalist.

As true even for Keith Olbermann as for Bill O'Reilly.

But what knowledge is applicable and true for all of us with respect to judging the behaviors we choose that come into conflict with the behaviors others choose? This: That we MUST "judge" them because they DO come into conflict over and again. We must establish rules of behavior.

The rest however revolves around power or upbringing or our capacity [as daseins] to convince as many others as possible to choose this rule instead of that one. And [hopefully] to codify these rules democratically in the form of laws.

Now, the "mind of man" is able to take phenomenal experiences and try to grapple with what they all share in common. What can we KNOW about human experience that might allow us to establish essential, transcendental truths that might allow us in turn to factor out any particular choice made by any particular moral agent in any particular circumstantial context and establish instead behaviors that ALL moral [and mortal] agents would embrace as the most rational choices?

And that all fits together superbly when we are exchanging ideas, words, concepts, definitions, meaning etc. about it.

Ah, but you know what's coming next from me, right? Then what?

I feel that there is a rather simple matter to show that we are in possession of a priori knowledge. We still have the complication of us taking each other to possess the same faculties (which we seem to be assuming since we are trying to communicate). What are your initial thoughts about this approach?

My initial thought is that we do not really know where to begin in establishing what our initial thoughts ought to be when confronted with actual existential behavior. There are simply too many convoluted and ever evolving variables hopelessly intertwined in dasein for any of us to establish an order of comportment on par with 1 + 1 = 2 or e = mc2.

Hell, we don't even know with any degree of certainty whether human autonomy [free will] itself exists in order to grapple with this at all. Instead, over the course of actually living our lives, we come into contact with conflicting ways to think about these things. Then, for reasons known only to each of us, we take our leap to the initial thoughts of folks that seem most reasonable to us. Here and now. Or, as I stress over and again, thoughts and beliefs that are most comforting to us psychologically. Some ground themselves in God, some in Marx, some in Rand, some in Kant.

And some, like me, in nihilism.

But trust me. I would never be foolish enough to suggest that I know what nihilism is. Let alone that I know what a nihilist is obligated to either do or not do.