Acrobat,

You have expended all this energy trying to tell people why they are wrong.

Why don't you explain why you are right?

(August 2, 2019 at 4:08 pm)EgoDeath Wrote:

(August 2, 2019 at 12:16 am)Fierce Wrote: The username is certainly fitting, all those mental gymnastics.

I made that connection when I first saw the username and always wondered if any one else noticed it. Funny.

---

Gae and Acrobat have been arguing for four days straight now. Must be nice to not have to work or deal with people in the real world. To spend all of your conceivable time on AF. How fascinating.

lmao

It’s good to be the king.



( if you wanna know how I make my money just ask, could always use another hand in this business, all you need to get started is any acreage in excess of 50)

(August 2, 2019 at 8:34 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote:

(August 2, 2019 at 4:08 pm)EgoDeath Wrote: I made that connection when I first saw the username and always wondered if any one else noticed it. Funny.

---

Gae and Acrobat have been arguing for four days straight now. Must be nice to not have to work or deal with people in the real world. To spend all of your conceivable time on AF. How fascinating.

lmao

It’s good to be the king.



( if you wanna know how I make my money just ask, could always use another hand in this business, all you need to get started is any acreage in excess of 50)

lol wish I had a small group of friends with backpacks and some scary black assault rifles. I'm always down for a good free harvest.

(July 29, 2019 at 11:25 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: But Good exists, and we both agree it does. So the matter is settled, and we agree on that.

Yes, we both agree on this.

Quote:Nor has he proven that you can't get an ought from an is.

In my view one derived the ought from the Good, and not from the “is”/the facts on the ground. The “is” is descriptive, while the Good is normative.

Quote:And that's the difference between you and me. And that's the difference between you and Plato. Do you think morals are obligations? They aren't.

But for those who realize an ideal and strive to attain it, that is moral realism. Moral realism isn't like the law of gravity that you are compelled to follow whether you want to or not. Moral realism is that which you can either ignore or acknowledge. How you treat others is a reality. It is a significant reality.

Yes, I think morals are an obligation, more real than any other obligation. But this doesn’t mean we are compelled to follow them whether we want to or not, like the laws of gravity.

The similarity here would be to love. I love my daughters more than anything else in the world. Love places a great deal of demands and obligations on me, to not fail them, or do them wrong, to raise them rightly, to be a good example, etc... These obligations placed on me by love, are more real to me than any sort of legal obligations.

I don’t see the Good, as some sort of pretty dress in the window, which can be admired from a distance at how pretty it is, but like that of an intrusive wife. The Good illuminates our failures to be good, exposes the weight of it, a father you want to love and kill at the same time.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that when the man who tried to tell his friends in the cave about the Good, he wasn’t welcomed as someone giving them a great gift, but preferred to kill him instead.

(August 3, 2019 at 7:37 am)Acrobat Wrote:

(July 29, 2019 at 11:25 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: But Good exists, and we both agree it does. So the matter is settled, and we agree on that.

Yes, we both agree on this.

Quote:Nor has he proven that you can't get an ought from an is.

In my view one derived the ought from the Good, and not from the “is”/the facts on the ground. The “is” is descriptive, while the Good is normative.

Quote:And that's the difference between you and me. And that's the difference between you and Plato. Do you think morals are obligations? They aren't.

But for those who realize an ideal and strive to attain it, that is moral realism. Moral realism isn't like the law of gravity that you are compelled to follow whether you want to or not. Moral realism is that which you can either ignore or acknowledge. How you treat others is a reality. It is a significant reality.

Yes, I think morals are an obligation, more real than any other obligation. But this doesn’t mean we are compelled to follow them whether we want to or not, like the laws of gravity.

The similarity here would be to love. I love my daughters more than anything else in the world. Love places a great deal of demands and obligations on me, to not fail them, or do them wrong, to raise them rightly, to be a good example, etc... These obligations placed on me by love, are more real to me than any sort of legal obligations.

I don’t see the Good, as some sort of pretty dress in the window, which can be admired from a distance at how pretty it is, but like that of an intrusive wife. The Good illuminates our failures to be good, exposes the weight of it, a father you want to love and kill at the same time.

I don’t think it’s coincidence that when the man who tried to tell his friends in the cave about the Good, he wasn’t welcomed as someone giving them a great gift, but preferred to kill him instead.

Stronger obligation, maybe. But that's a difference in degree, not a qualitative difference.

(August 3, 2019 at 7:37 am)Acrobat Wrote: Yes, I think morals are an obligation, more real than any other obligation. But this doesn’t mean we are compelled to follow them whether we want to or not, like the laws of gravity.  

The similarity here would be to love. I love my daughters more than anything else in the world. Love places a great deal of demands and obligations on me, to not fail them, or do them wrong, to raise them rightly, to be a good example, etc... These obligations placed on me by love, are more real to me than any sort of legal obligations.

But what if you didn't love your daughters? What if you hated them? Would you still be "obligated" not to fail them?

For me, I seriously do not like Muslim fundamentalists. But does that give me the right to chop off their heads? No. I must respect their personhood, and I must respect the fact that me chopping their heads off is no better than them chopping off the heads of atheists or gays. Better than may be the operative phrase here. And not "obligated to." None of my life duties obligates me to do anything. If I fail in some of my duties, there may be consequences. But that doesn't mean that consequences determine my duties. "The Good" or the "making things better than they are, are what defines my moral objective.

Quote:(1) A property P is genuine if it figures ineliminably in a good explanation of observed
phenomena.
(2) Moral properties figure ineliminably in good explanations of observed phenomena.
Therefore
(3) Moral properties are genuine.


The ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations is one perennially attractive argument in favour of the metaphysical claims of realism. The initially attractive thought is that moral properties earn their ontological rights in the same way as the metaphysically unproblematic properties of the natural and social sciences, namely by figuring in good explanatory theories. So just as, for example, a physicist may explain why an oil droplet stays suspended in an electro-magnetic field by citing its charge, or a social scientist may explain high levels of mental illness by citing income inequality, a ‘moral scientist’ may explain the growth of political protest movements or social instability by citing injustice. Likewise, just as an observer of the physicist may explain why he believes that the oil droplet is charged by citing the charge itself, and an observer of the sociologist may explain why she believes that income inequality exists by citing the inequality itself, an observer of the ‘moral scientist’ may explain why they believe that a situation is unjust by citing the injustice itself. In such cases, it appears that the instantiation of a moral property – injustice – is causally relevant in producing an effect – a political protest movement or moral judgement.

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1930/1/T...prints.pdf

[/quote]

(August 7, 2019 at 8:43 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: But what if you didn't love your daughters? What if you hated them? Would you still be "obligated" not to fail them?

Yes, because I’m obligated to love them, whether I do or not.

Imagine being a child of such a father, his failing would be quite evident. “He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father.”

Quote: None of my life duties obligates me to do anything. If I fail in some of my duties, there may be consequences. But that doesn't mean that consequences determine my duties. "The Good" or the "making things better than they are, are what defines my moral objective.

I agree it’s the Good that defines our goal. It is what obligates us.

The Good doesn’t exist as a pretty dress in a window which I can casually decide whether I want to put on, hence why Plato’s description involves the collective murder of the one trying to reveal it to the cave dwellers.

Are you obligated to love my children, or me? Do we even have to love our own children in order to be “good parents”...and what, exactly, does that entail?

It’s tempting to imagine that relational ethics express some fundamental realist unit of moral currency, but they don’t. They’re a description of subjective state when contemplating the affection we have for our kids. To be blunt, basing a moral system off of love can be nothing other-than subjectivist.

This isn’t to say that they’re not a useful set of positive obligations, ofc. A species with children who need substantial care wouldn’t survive without some biological compulsion towards their offspring.

(August 8, 2019 at 7:50 am)Acrobat Wrote:

(August 7, 2019 at 8:43 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: But what if you didn't love your daughters? What if you hated them? Would you still be "obligated" not to fail them?

Yes, because I’m obligated to love them, whether I do or not.

Imagine being a child of such a father, his failing would be quite evident. “He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father.”

Yeah but that's not really how the world works. What about different scenarios?

“He wasn’t a good father, when he ought to have been a good father” Smacks of social normativism and conformity. What about this? "He often didn't do an adequate job as a father, especially during those many times when he was accepting his 'Dad of the Year Award.'" Plato addresses this directly in the Republic. Book II (358e-359d).




You aren't obligated to love your daughters, man. You just do.  And since you love them, you are bound to do right by them. That's just the way love works. But I don't think how you treat people whom you love is very much relevant to ethics. To me, the more pertinent question is: how do you treat people you hate? Or: how should you treat people you hate? You Christiany types like to say that people should love one another. And I dig it and everything, but it isn't realistic. Plus that, Christian love is an odd kind of love. Christian love thinks things like convincing gay men to enter unfulfilling heterosexual marriages is "loving" them. No it isn't.

Genuine love of a gay person usually entails wanting them to be happy and fulfilled in their lives. But that's not Christian love.

"Wear the yoke of conformity." THAT'S what "Christian love" usually amounts to. What kind of piss poor love is that? But I digress.

The question isn't whether you "ought" to be a good father. The question is: How can I be a good father? When you decide to be a good father you take on the yoke of that particular moral duty. And it has nothing to do with love or emotion. It has everything to do with what (objectively) one needs to do in order to be good at fathering. The rules for being a good father are not arbitrary. You can't just say, "leaving my children to starve in the cold is good fathering in my opinion." Same goes with morality. Morality is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact.

Quote:I agree it’s the Good that defines our goal. It is what obligates us.

The Good doesn’t exist as a pretty dress in a window which I can casually decide whether I want to put on, hence why Plato’s description involves the collective murder of the one trying to reveal it to the cave dwellers.

Exactly. I think what Plato is saying here (and I agree with him wholeheartedly) is that the group mentality is in no way shape or form a moral mentality. (Though it very much pretends to be.)
But this is yet another strike against the Christians who very often confuse the two. One may say, in the Christians' defense that they are a group like any other and should not be criticized especially for possessing the default foibles common to all groups. But! The Christians make themselves an exception. They call their herd mentality by tender names. I've known homophobic frat boys who "don't like queers." But they (at the very least) they didn't claim their bigotry was some kind of righteousness urge, as Christians often do. The evangelical Christian lifestyle is objectively immoral in many regards. It promotes hatred and violence. And what's worse, it is so sure of itself because it is based in doctrine, that it dares not question or challenge itself as far as moral issues are concerned.
I like a lot of the Christian moral imperatives, don't get me wrong. I dig the Sermon on the Mount more than you may realize. But all this immoral baggage (bigotry, hatred, violence, and coercion) that is attached to Christianity is morally wrong in an objective sense. And it bothers me to no end when Christians make bullshit claims like "you can't even have morality without God." BULLSHIT. The opposite is true.

(August 8, 2019 at 9:51 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: You aren't obligated to love your daughters, man. You just do.  And since you love them, you are bound to do right by them.

I don't always love my daughters, i sometime hate, and resent them as well, that's just the nature of most people's moral life's, as conflicting.

It's very well possible, that I might find a lover, leave my wife and kids, and shack up with her and have no further contact with them at all. But one thing I couldn't deny even in this new found life, is that I was obligated to love my children, that I ought not to have done what I did, at least not without lying to myself.

If you ever had to deal with a failed father, a man who wasn't a very good father, or husband, even they seem aware of this, at some fundamental and deeper level.

In fact such an obligation, seems more real than any other obligation, they even appear more real than you or I.

Perhaps you say it's product of social normativism and conformity. Yet you do make a distinction between a group mentality vs moral mentality.

You also seem to acknowledge, that "leaving my children to starve in the cold is good fathering" isn't right, and that the rules of being a good father aren't arbitrary. This doesn't seem to be in your view to be a product of social normativism and conformity. Perhaps you agree that what's Good, even in fathering, is a product of the Good, and not society?

I see the obligation of being a good father as a product of the Good as well, though you seem to disagree.

I want to know more about The Good, and how it "inwardly works in the soul".

Let's say I'm a bad father, who then comes to recognize "The Good", what effect would it have on me? Would it compel me to be Good? Or just something I acknowledge as casually pretty, that doesn't compel or move me morally one way or the other?


(As far as homosexuality, "Christian love" etc, I have no interest in that discussion, most of it seems to center around white American evangelical Christianity, tied to politics and nationalistic ideals, in which I have no real connection with, to defend. )