Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[Ignorant]

Apple and Rocks do not have any inherent "food" meaning to them. We give the meaning to the objects as they correlate to our desires.

I agree. Did I speak of "foodness" before? I don't recall that I did.

There is nothing in a thing, upon first sight, that conveys which desire it satisfies best. If I see an apple for the first time, I will not be able to "abstract" any goodness it may have to satisfy my hunger. If that has come across as my meaning, then I apologize, but I am not sure that I have put it this way. Like you said, we must first experience both the desire and its satisfaction to learn which things satisfy them best.

If all that existed was a single option, how might you classify that?

Could you classify it? No. Could you judge it as either causing an increase or a decrease in desire upon obtaining it? Yes. When did "classify" begin to mean the same thing as judge? Perhaps that is our confusion.

In order to classify something, it MUST be done in reference to judgments about it and other things. In order to judge something as good, bad, whatever, it does not require other things. It merely requires the test of satisfaction or not satisfaction.

I mean that that if you are hungry and you eat a rock, you will experience a brain state...If you eat an apple, you will trigger another...and that one is certainly more desirable than the other.

Indeed

In principle, not in practice. Stick your tongue in an electrical socket. I'd say that's an objectively worse way to live a fulfilling life.

Well of course, HA! By calling goodness "inherently subjective" I do not also mean "entirely" subjective. So goodness is subjective BOTH in principle and in practice, AND it is inherently OBJECTIVE in BOTH principle and practice. That is actually what subjective and objective mean. They are not mutually exclusive terms. There are active and judging subjects that encounter and try to make sense of the objects in the world, and there are the objects in the world whose reality is encountered by acting and judging subjects.

The objects have a true reality about them. Call it objective reality (i.e. the truth about the objects). Human beings, considered as objects (i.e. considered as an encountered object), have a truth about them are as well.

From our individual perspectives (i.e. our subjective experiences of the world), we view the world as acting and judging subjects. We encounter objects, and as rational things, we try to make sense of them and to understand the truth about them.

The description of how our own subjective experience (as conscious creatures) relates with objects in the world and their effects on us is one way of explaining ethics. The more we know about the objects, and about ourselves (e.g. the neuroscience of happiness), the more we can reform our own subjective experiences to correspond to the reality of the objects.

Explain to me how you might first make a billboard top 40 list of songs without first having music?

You can't. "Things must first be judged individually before they can be compared as more or less desirable than other things." (My last post). And things must exist before they can be judged.

and before that, you would need the creative inspiration that gives rise to it, would you not?

Well sure.

The appraisal of what comes later is only after you have samples to compare. You're putting the cart before the horse...

I don't understand how this:

1) A things must first exist before they can be judged
2) Things must be individually judged as satisfying in order to be ranked according to the degree of satisfaction they bring.

is different than this:

1) Different musical pieces must first exist before it can be included on a list of "best" music.
2) Then those pieces must be arranged individually as more or less pleasing to hear in order to be ranked.

Have you ever said that a song is good without reference to some other song? I know I have.

I'm reminded of Socrates here...Is a bag carried because it is being carried? Or does the bag possess some intrinsic quality of carriedness even if it were sitting on the ground? In this case, it's carried IF it is being carried, and as soon as it hits the floor, it is no longer carried. An apple is an apple. It is food if it can be healthily ingested. As soon as there is nothing on this planet to consume this apple or assign additional meaning to it, it just is what it is.

I agree with all of this. How many times must I affirm that I am not a Platonist? There is no such thing as "foodness" or "carriedness" existing out there somewhere. When we speak of goodness, we are not looking at a "characteristic" or "part" of a thing or an action. As I have said, goodness means desirable(subjectively)/able to satisfy(objectively).

I made reference to another use of which I am not yet convinced, or else still trying to figure out, exactly, what it would mean. That is goodness as used interchangeably with "being". According to this use, the more a thing IS what it is, the "better" it is, the more "goodness" it has (because goodness just means being). In other words, there is something common to the fullness of humanity for every individual human being. The more of that common fullness any of us has, the "better" human being we will be. You said that when there is nothing left to assign meaning to the apple, it will just simply be an apple. This understanding of goodness would say, the more that apple fully IS an apple, the better it is. This understanding, however, IS based on Aristotelian (and therefore some Plato) physics and metaphysics, and I have already said that these are in need of revision. When I said my position is like Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, I said it was close, and a lot of my framework comes from them. However, I can hold many of their positions while simultaneously recognizing the shortcomings of many other aspects. That is why I am here talking it out.