RE: What would be the harm?
November 30, 2018 at 9:50 pm
(This post was last modified: November 30, 2018 at 10:12 pm by bennyboy.)
I have to say that the Merriam Webster dictionary seems to have little interest in the finer points of moral ontology.
"Fail" implies a goal. But if one has no particular destination, how can one be said to "fail" to arrive there at all? Can it be that I'm walking my dog, and something in the Universe pops ups and says, "Fuck you. You didn't arrive at Disneyland. You've failed!" Has a homosexual person "failed" to be straight, if he doesn't see being gay as a failure? Has a chronic masturbator "failed" to keep it in his pants, if he enjoys what he does? Has a fat person "failed" to stay thin, even though he loves food and thinks he looks like a badass sumo-wrestling mofo?
To say that the goals are objective is to say that something in the Universe is intrinsically goal-oriented. But how would material interactions be said to be right or wrong in any regard? What would such a Universal goal even look like?
I'm not sure that I'd even say that evolution itself is goal-oriented. I'd say that all goals as we see them are reverse-engineered: I get a terrible feeling when I see a child harmed, and know that most people also do, and so I infer that our evolutionary history has arrived at a "goal" of preventing harm to children.
I then take an additional step: having inferred a virtual goal, I will start planning the process of conformity my nature, with the understanding that this is likely to reduce stress or induce happiness.
Is there any of this that you are online with?
"Fail" implies a goal. But if one has no particular destination, how can one be said to "fail" to arrive there at all? Can it be that I'm walking my dog, and something in the Universe pops ups and says, "Fuck you. You didn't arrive at Disneyland. You've failed!" Has a homosexual person "failed" to be straight, if he doesn't see being gay as a failure? Has a chronic masturbator "failed" to keep it in his pants, if he enjoys what he does? Has a fat person "failed" to stay thin, even though he loves food and thinks he looks like a badass sumo-wrestling mofo?
To say that the goals are objective is to say that something in the Universe is intrinsically goal-oriented. But how would material interactions be said to be right or wrong in any regard? What would such a Universal goal even look like?
I'm not sure that I'd even say that evolution itself is goal-oriented. I'd say that all goals as we see them are reverse-engineered: I get a terrible feeling when I see a child harmed, and know that most people also do, and so I infer that our evolutionary history has arrived at a "goal" of preventing harm to children.
I then take an additional step: having inferred a virtual goal, I will start planning the process of conformity my nature, with the understanding that this is likely to reduce stress or induce happiness.
Is there any of this that you are online with?
