Good and Evil

[bennyboy]

If things can be objectively good, then why couldn't there be a context in which things are judged good? It would require a context that approaches "good" in the same manner that "objective truth" is ascertained---gathering information from the senses and coining definitions to which we can apply seemingly irrefutable conceptual relationships between a body of "facts." Of course, as we move from individuals to species and then to the entire history of the world, the "end" may be more difficult to define with precision and certainty, but this is only to be expected and allowed. I don't think our inability to say that existence---in the hypothetical context of 100 trillion years from now---matters in any real sense, restricts us from saying that existence now, or as it very reasonably may relate to the foreseeable future, whether that's a context that involves our grandchildren or our great-great-great-great-great grandchildren, matters, and moreover, matters more than an iota of anything else that could be said to be at all meaningful to sentient beings, present or sure to be in the approaching days, weeks, months, years, decades, and even centuries. We can try to diminish ourselves in the pursuit of truth as much as possible, and to the extent that this proves fruitful in satisfying our vain curiosities, I think it ought to be sought after, but when it---in what you call a vicious circle---diminishes the very pursuit, and the object of truth, itself, rendering both to be nothing short of absurd and worse, even less dignified than the designation of falsehood since we have no basis for claiming anything to be true or false, i.e. in any context outside of our own mental citadels, I think it may be safe to say that we have gone terribly awry. And speaking of vicious circles, didn't the philosophizing of certain presocratics lead them to conceive of god as an eternal sphere? 

Well, to me it always comes down to ambiguism. For example, what does "subjective" mean in an objective world view? You could argue that all ideas, including ideas about what are good and evil, are subjective, because they require minds, or objective, because those ideas are spawned by minds which neither created themselves nor guided their own development.

I said before that free will is as real as any abstract: love, purpose, etc. But while that was taken to mean that I think free will is real, it wasn't exactly that: it's that the truth of something varies as much on the perspective of the subjective agent as on the objective reality.

I think that your aversion to absurdity (and worse) is telling. To people, meaninglessness is absurd. But that aversion isn't a good enough reason to establish meaning as having an objective reality.

It seemed to me to be the type of "dilemma" I've heard unthinking theists raise with respect to positing pleasure (which is almost immediately associated with the most base form of hedonism in their minds) as an end in which to place objective goods, which goes something like, "Is it then wrong to cut open a little girl's stomach with a large blade because it will cause her pain" (Even though the person wielding the sharp object is a physician about to perform a life-saving operation)? Antibiotics are good because the killing of trillions of mindless (and most assuredly unfeeling), microscopic organisms is not destroying any form of life that can be comparable in any sense to the well-being of sentient (let alone rational) creatures (a view which I would similarly hold in the case of abortions).

There are certain red-flag scenarios where people refuse to contine with logical thinking, because doing so seems monstrous. Child-killing, baby rape, voting Republican, stuff like that. But I think we have to be brave and ask the philosophical questions whose answers seem most obvious, and not accept that they really are obvious.

What's wrong with baby rape, exactly? It shows a severe level of genetic dysfunction, or psychological deviation, and is likely to cause physical pain and ongoing psychological suffering. And yet we eat veal. We tear baby animals from their mothers, ignoring their cries of distress because they're "just animals." What's the dividing line? I think it really is just animal instinct: we consider baby rape horribly wrong because it combines our instincts to protect young humans with our instincts against genetically unfit sexual behavior. Being human, our instincts (most of us), fire less strongly for the offspring of other animals. Oh yeah, and just one more word: circumcision. I mean-- fuck. But if I could convince myself that Asian kids (let's say) were a good source of protein and dietary fibre, and could teach myself to disregard their wellbeing, what, objectively, would be wrong with farming them and eating them with A1 sauce?

That's the kind of context I'm talking about. Do you look at the objective development of our ability to feel, and say that our morals are therefore objective? Or do you look at the feelings themselves, and say that any idea or behavior that arises from them, including a moral sense, is subjective? Or do you look back 14.5 billion years and say it all comes from X (fill in your philosophical, scientific or religious hunch here)?