Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?

[bennyboy]

Normally they are likely to say that.  But if we hold morality of the act is to be determined by the subject at the time of action, their normal view does not matter.  Rather their view under emotional and hormonal override is the determinate of the morality of their conduct.  So do they think that course of action is best/correct/right at that instance?  Likely the answer is yes.

No, I think even at the exact moment of the action, a person does not think that cheating on his wife is moral, or that injecting heroin into the body is moral. And the reason, imo, is as I said: mores are ideas, and moral failures represent not a temporary alternative idea, but rather a moment in which those ideas aren't accessed or acted on.

You are viewing a person as an indivisible moral agent. However, a person is a composite of many influences, some of which may supercede or override others. Mores access a relatively high mental process: the world view. But more basic processes, like the desire for sex, food, or pleasure, are perfectly capable of hijacking a person's decision-making processes.

[Anima]

Can;t own your own statements from one post to the next? What a fraud.

Bolded for you to see. Option one (ethical utility) and two (appeal to authority).

Hmm.  To put it in a similar manner I would say it is as follows first I argued:
1.  A person acts according to ethical utility, an argument to numbers, which leads to immoral actions.
2.  A person makes an appeal to authority in order to override the appeal to numbers to engage in immoral actions.
3.  The authority appealed to will not be supported by direct explicit empirical proof and thus may be considered fictional.
4.  Thus, one must appeal to a fictional entity (their person, conscience, schema, or deity) in order to have an authority to override utility.

Then I argued:
1.  An appeal to authority, where the authority is subjective results in a morality based on whims.
2.  An appeal to authority, where the authority is objective (in actuality or proxy) results in morality that overrides whims.
3.  A person engages in the act believed to be subjectively best/correct/right.
4.  Under subjective determination all acts are right; under objective determination all acts are not right.

---

Normally they are likely to say that.  But if we hold morality of the act is to be determined by the subject at the time of action, their normal view does not matter.  Rather their view under emotional and hormonal override is the determinate of the morality of their conduct.  So do they think that course of action is best/correct/right at that instance?  Likely the answer is yes.

No, I think even at the exact moment of the action, a person does not think that cheating on his wife is moral, or that injecting heroin into the body is moral.  And the reason, imo, is as I said: mores are ideas, and moral failures represent not a temporary alternative idea, but rather a moment in which those ideas aren't accessed or acted on.

You are viewing a person as an indivisible moral agent.  However, a person is a composite of many influences, some of which may supercede or override others.  Mores access a relatively high mental process: the world view.  But more basic processes, like the desire for sex, food, or pleasure, are perfectly capable of hijacking a person's decision-making processes.

Sorry for belaboring this point. What do you mean by hijacking a person's decision making process? It appears you are saying the higher moral ideas are not being accessed or acted upon at that time. Which I am more than willing to accept. Now would we say such for every immoral action? That every immoral action is simply a moment of higher moral ideas being inaccessible to our person?

If so I think we are still in the same boat. As we would say the person's actions are always morally acceptable since they are either acting rightly or they are acting in a diminished capacity and not to be judged as acting wrongly. Thus, every action is moral or amoral and no action is immoral.

[bennyboy]

The new editor on this forum pisses me off.


Bump.

[bennyboy]

Sorry for belaboring this point. What do you mean by hijacking a person's decision making process? It appears you are saying the higher moral ideas are not being accessed or acted upon at that time. Which I am more than willing to accept. Now would we say such for every immoral action? That every immoral action is simply a moment of higher moral ideas being inaccessible to our person?
 If so I think we are still in the same boat. As we would say the person's actions are always morally acceptable since they are either acting rightly or they are acting in a diminished capacity and not to be judged as acting wrongly. Thus, every action is moral or amoral and no action is immoral.

No, it's not like the person is unconscious.  If I'm having sex with a woman who's not my wife, and my sexual desire supercedes my world view as the main behavioral motivator, I'm still aware that what I'm doing is wrong.  If I go through with it, could I have acted otherwise?  Could my love, if deep enough, have "fought back," and brought my moral systems back on line in time to prevent the consummation of the immoral act?  Maybe, maybe not.  But this is irrelevant to whether the act is right or not.  It's subjectively wrong if my world view hold that kind of act as wrong, without regard to how things play out.

[The Grand Nudger]

Back up to two again, fine, fraud....as before, you've given two alternatives that demonstrate that there is no necessity in your appeal to a fictitious character.  You think that the outcomes are not optimal, you think that the slope is slippery (it's a favorite of yours I can tell)...but that doesn't matter, because that wasn't the point of contention, the point which you demonstrated to be false in your attempt to argue it. That there was some -need- to appeal to a fictitious character, there isn't...and you've explained why so well yourself I see no reason to elaborate upon the refutation you offered of your own "argument". I'm satisfied...you've convinced me.

[Anima]

Back up to two again, fine, fraud....as before, you've given two alternatives that demonstrate that there is no necessity in your appeal to a fictitious character.  You think that the outcomes are not optimal, you think that the slope is slippery (it's a favorite of yours I can tell)...but that doesn't matter, because that wasn't the point of contention, the point which you demonstrated to be false in your attempt to argue it.  That there was some -need- to appeal to a fictitious character, there isn't...and you've explained why so well yourself I see no reason to elaborate upon the refutation you offered of your own "argument".  I'm satisfied...you've convinced me.

Let the record show that Rythm has been convinced of our argument that ethical utility shall lead to numerous immoral acts and that in order to engage in moral actions one will have to override ethical utility by means of an appeal to a fictitious authority. (As we have made no argument to the contrary). Thank you for your satisfaction.

---

Sorry for belaboring this point. What do you mean by hijacking a person's decision making process? It appears you are saying the higher moral ideas are not being accessed or acted upon at that time. Which I am more than willing to accept. Now would we say such for every immoral action? That every immoral action is simply a moment of higher moral ideas being inaccessible to our person?
 If so I think we are still in the same boat. As we would say the person's actions are always morally acceptable since they are either acting rightly or they are acting in a diminished capacity and not to be judged as acting wrongly. Thus, every action is moral or amoral and no action is immoral.

No, it's not like the person is unconscious.  If I'm having sex with a woman who's not my wife, and my sexual desire supercedes my world view as the main behavioral motivator, I'm still aware that what I'm doing is wrong.  If I go through with it, could I have acted otherwise?  Could my love, if deep enough, have "fought back," and brought my moral systems back on line in time to prevent the consummation of the immoral act?  Maybe, maybe not.  But this is irrelevant to whether the act is right or not.  It's subjectively wrong if my world view hold that kind of act as wrong, without regard to how things play out.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems you are arguing along the same lines as Nestor. Basically you are arguing the subjective adoption of a schema (world view) at some time in the past. You are then having this world view serve as the determinate of the moral quality of acts performed by the Subject. Now should your whims override your world view and you engage in an act not in keeping with the world view you would say that act is immoral.

As stated to Nestor so restated. In this scenario your "world view" is acting as an objective proxy determinate of morality. Upon adoption of the schema you are no longer operating according to subjective morality, as the moral quality of the action is not being determined by the Subject at the time of action, but by the fictitious "world view".

[The Grand Nudger]

Yet again you expose yourself as a charlatan, you've convinced me that your appeal isn't necessary, as I plainly stated, for the reasons I plainly stated...... which -you- provided me with.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, we've already determined that you refuse to address other peoples comments or positions, preferring to attribute your own -to them- and then carry on from there.

: shrugs :

[nihilistcat]

francismjenkins:

So it wasn't an ecclesiastical tribunal established by Pope Gregory IX circa 1232 for the suppression of heresy. According to your college, Wikipedia, It was active chiefly in northern Italy and southern France, becoming notorious for the use of torture. In 1542 the papal Inquisition was re-established to combat Protestantism, eventually becoming an organ of papal government? Hmmm, so you guys are now in bed with the likes of Texas. When the history books debunk their mythical view of history, they simply revise the history books. I've never been quite sure how this is different from just burning books, as authoritarians always need to do to sustain power.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
May I inquire as to which Inquisition are you referring to?  

1200 France and Northern Italy
1400 Spain or Portugal
1500 England, the Netherlands, Mexico or Peru
1600 Germany or Italy
1700 Japan
1800 United States

Anima is correct in his statement in that there are several Inquisition thought history that were not all established by Papal Bull but local/ Kingly governments.

Many forget that there was also Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, and Shinto Inquisitions throughout.

Many of the common and repeated ideas of the Inquisition are more on hearsay than historical facts. Recently, with the opening of both the Spanish and Vatican archives, there is a massive historical reexamination of this time in history; this new information on the Inquisitions has shed new light on what the Inquisitions really was and what were its actual functions.

For example, historians are finding that the Inquisition could not try non-Christians, that is to say those who were not baptized Christians. Jews, Muslims, Buddies, Hindus, and other faiths were untouchable, (never were they tried by the Inquisition because they could not be). Keep in mind that the full intent of the Inquisition was to reconcile the lost soul back to the Church. Both the Jews and Muslims that were tried by the Spanish and Portugal Inquisitions were Converto's" those who have converted to Christianity but was assumed to privately practicing their old faith.

Look, honestly ... the sort of behavior we saw during the inquisition is pretty much par for the course in western history. So if a church didn't start or aggravate something like an inquisition, some other lunatic tyrant would have done the deed, or something like that (and it was a particularly bloody and shitty period in western history). But the average tyrant doesn't run around saying that he has a divine mandate, much less a divine mandate from an esoteric, anarcho-socialist hippy who's considered a god-man. Talk about irony; that's irony on genetically engineered steroids

But I mean, except for the anarcho-socialist hippy part, it's not even a good story.

Another observation, it seems that either these religious characters are sterile virgins, or they're misogynistic lunatics. Where's the regular dude (or dudette) who just liked normal fucking? Oy, we were really weird back in the day.

[bennyboy]

As stated to Nestor so restated.  In this scenario your "world view" is acting as an objective proxy determinate of morality.  Upon adoption of the schema you are no longer operating according to subjective morality, as the moral quality of the action is not being determined by the Subject at the time of action, but by the fictitious "world view".

The adoption of the schema is the exact definition of the establishment of a subjective system of mores. What you call an "objective proxy" represents the world as one understands it, and as one would like it to be. This naturally represents the complex ideas upon which thoughtful behavior will be mediated.

If you want to argue that all thought, all minds, all experiences are objective because they are products of an apparently determinist universe, then rock and roll. Otherwise, you are necessarily either special pleading one case of "objective" which exactly matches everyone else's definition of "subjective," or you equivocating on it in establishing a part of the mind of the Subject as a virtual object.

I suspect the latter to be the case. If mental function, including the building and reference to ideas and systems of ideas, are "objects," then to what are they objects? The mind either is an entity unto itself, or it is an object of the soul. The only problem with this is that you just fall right away into philosophical issues of cosmogony and psychogony, and you'll find it impossible to make any headway in this conversation. Nobody is seriously going to entertain the idea of a soul as a solution to the "fiction" of the world view, since it is simpler by an order of magnitude simply to see the world view as an important aspect of the agency of the self.

[nihilistcat]

Another observation about inquisitions ... in many cases, we blow localized (barely significant) incidents in history way out of proportion, to excuse things like mass executions. As I implied above, inquisitions and other forms of mass murder and torture were par for the course in western history. The fact that a church was involved in at least one of those incidents is hardly a compelling argument for anything, besides the fact that churches are just as fallible as the men who created them, and indeed, religion merely reflects the primitivity of its authors. In fact religion memorializes that primitivity, and transforms it into a moral code.

"Morality makes stupid.-- Custom represents the experiences of men of earlier times as to what they supposed useful and harmful - but the sense for custom (morality) applies, not to these experiences as such, but to the age, the sanctity, the indiscussability of the custom. And so this feeling is a hindrance to the acquisition of new experiences and the correction of customs: that is to say, morality is a hindrance to the development of new and better customs: it makes stupid." Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak.

Another point. Even before the inquisitions, the Catholic church imprisoned people for heresy. But then, in the heat of argument, we start talking about what the other guy did, and how what we did wasn't quite as bad, when none of this is relevant to the threshold question, which is: are the foundational claims of religion, the claims that grant it its authority, bullshit? If they are, then the claims made by a priest or pastor or rabbi or some other cleric should be considered no more compelling than the claims made by a street beggar. Indeed, the homeless man can probably offer much better insight into human nature than some cleric who in many cases lives a reclusive, esoteric life, with all sorts of bizarre fears regarding his own sexuality, and a neurotic impulse towards an unattainable purity.

That said, I've encountered many religious people dedicated to helping the poor, stomping out racism, etc. Incidentally, they usually have a much more progressive outlook (even towards their own religious doctrines). It grants people solace to think that their son, who was unjustly killed by a police officer or in a gang shooting or whatever, is in a better place, and I'm just not callous enough to look that mother in the eye and explain to her that her beloved son is most likely just worm food. So until science comes up with a better alternative, religion will stick around. Atheism isn't for everyone, and sometimes, reality sucks. So I have no naive preconceptions about religiosity or atheism; and religion does not have a monopoly on tyranny. So my hope is merely that people become a little more skeptical, accepting of well settled scientific principles, and reject the tribalism which has been a hallmark of religion through time.

I also think Protestantism made important innovations. Here's a video clip of a lecture on this subject from the philosopher, Slavoj Zizek (who can explain this much better than me):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOUGR1SsTD0

Zizek also did a wonderful lecture entitled "why only an atheist can believe" ... but it's much too long to present here.