Defense, excuse, it is all the same to the christiboi warriors.

Their tiny, tiny, minds cannot, will not, distinguish the difference.

How things are, and whether we should care about or be motivated by them (if they were whatever way x being proposed) could be the same question, might not be the same question, or it may be an open question.

Say that the world really was metaethically subjective. That's the way things are. No more bickering!

-Well, if so, then why should I care?

Or maybe, above still a given, we could notice that people succeed and fail by every notion of meaning or import or morality they hold - even in their own apprehension. With nothing other than self interest to guide us, and with our acknowledgement of some thing x as self interest - we can still find ourselves unmotivated, demoralized, afraid.

-Things may be that given way, but whether or not that motivates us is an altogether different question that does have a significant component of externality to it. Namely, circumstance.

Or maybe they really are the same question. Maybe we can't understand what anyone is talking about with the terms meaning, or import, or morality aside from the understanding that these are terms we use to refer explicitly to what we care about. That if we understood what any of them were, we would also - by that same token, understand why we should care.

-Perhaps, in such a given world, for genuinely subjectivist understandings of meaning or import why we should care is a non starter. That we do is the meaning, import, or moral making property in the first place.

The above can be repeated for every type of moral system, ofc. The answers wont be identical or identical in all cases, but they probably will look remarkably the same in practice. In many cases, where a number of divergent hypothesis or theories arrive at a set of shared observations and conclusions - we begin to suspect that they're all describing some and the same underlying thing.

(December 4, 2023 at 11:39 am)no one Wrote: Defense, excuse, it is all the same to the christiboi warriors.

Their tiny, tiny, minds cannot, will not, distinguish the difference.

Right, but I won't allow them to frame my thinking.

(December 4, 2023 at 12:02 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The above can be repeated for every type of moral system, ofc.  The answers wont be identical or identical in all cases, but they probably will look remarkably the same in practice.  In many cases, where a number of divergent hypothesis or theories arrive at a set of shared observations and conclusions - we begin to suspect that they're all describing some and the same underlying thing.

Like all the different kinds of religion?

Sure? I touched on that at the beginning of the thread. I think religions (and beliefs about gods) are an attempt to describe and categorize nature. They look like first attempts to me. I see them increasing in complexity over time as new facts (or assertions to fact) come to our attention.

In that process christianity, for example, manages to get meaning, import and morality wholly wrong while still describing some true things to it.

This guy:
Defense, excuse, it is all the same to the christiboi warriors.

Their tiny, tiny, minds cannot, will not, distinguish the difference. 


Thumps:
Right, but I won't allow them to frame my thinking.



That's the key word there Mr. Alumpacus, thinking, something those warriors for jebus are incapable of.

(December 4, 2023 at 12:59 pm)no one Wrote: That's the key word there Mr. Alumpacus, thinking, something those warriors for jebus are incapable of.

They obviously don't think if they come here to preach. They have to succumb to the urge to be an obnoxious asswipe before they ever log in here. Current shithead is the case in point.

(December 4, 2023 at 11:00 am)Ahriman Wrote:

(December 4, 2023 at 8:58 am)FrustratedFool Wrote: This simply pushes the question back: why should I care about human flourishing?

The only answer is because I care for my own interest - so just cut out the middle-man and ask what do I prefer.  Hence ethics is just my personal preference.  It just so happens that I prefer, generally, human flourishing for my own best interest (whether practical or emotional).

Ethics boils down to preference and then expediency (what best accomplishes my desires).  Anything else is pointless addition or rhetoric.

I can safely say I would prefer the opposite of human flourishing, because that would suit my interests. I'm sure there are not too many people who would agree with my stance on this. But less humans means less competition. It also means a more managable population, in terms of building an ideal society.

If our numbers are more manageable and that makes a more ideal society possible, that would be human flourishing. Human flourishing is about people being able to live their best lives. That probably doesn't look like crippling overpopulation.

If we're open to being right or wrong about what things will lead to flourishing (or our own self interest) then we should probably have some example of some thing that we as individuals could more easily get, if there were fewer humans - and so..less competition. It's at least possible that we have more or access to more precisely because there are so many of us.

I've used a mouse and a hand axe to make a distinction to explore self sufficiency and poverty, in principle and in practice, over deep human time. Hand axes are ubiquitous. Everyone everwhere, at some point, knew how to build a hand axe. The humble computer mouse is even moreso. More of them exist right now than the total number of hand axes ever found or likely to have existed. No single person anywhere knows how to make a mouse from scratch.

Now, we can safely presume that, while there were fewer people before and less competition between people for resources...and that those people were far more self sufficient than any one of today - we can also safely conclude that human life has become less, rather than more impoverished as we find ourselves here today. The whole shebang relies on a vast network of specialized labor that wouldn't even occur to us until we had enough people at a minimum to sustain it.

With all of that in mind, is it really true that fewer people or less competition leads to more human flourishing - or would credibly be expected to service some contemporary persons own private and unique desires, disposition, or expectations about material gain or competition? Could it be that naked greed is misinformed, and is..in fact, the very reason that naked greed fails and has so often failed as a means or justification to acquire it's own aims? That self sufficiency is a myth, that the number of people required to sustain any given number of people -at any level- is always a yet larger number?