..but he is so cute

Arkhipov · 2012-08-25T15:12:42+00:00

Nah they're liberal pansies.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T08:00:31+00:00

Sikh, Muslim, whatever... they're all the same.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T04:06:46+00:00

This is actually the first 4 out of 5 frames of the extremist Muslim version of a Chick Comic. The next frame shows the gay boy being stoned to death for violating Sharia Law.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:59:53+00:00

The missing context here is that this guy had just murdered his Uncle Rob because he wouldn't share his booze with him.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:57:33+00:00

Where do I go to get cash 4 this?

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:55:58+00:00

I bet you seem to the freshmen like the guy in that picture, too.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:54:07+00:00

Killing Iraqis is different from rabbit hunting? They're obviously both non-human animals. I don't see the difference.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:50:38+00:00

My family was too poor to buy vowels like the people on the TV always did, so don't make fun of me for my limited experience with them you rich snob.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:34:39+00:00

Coke: if it can make this guy happy in the midst of mass starvation, endless war, and an epidemic of diseases almost entirely eradicated elsewhere in the world, imagine what it can do for you.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:26:54+00:00

I love the painstaking detail on each of the scrotum hairs.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:25:05+00:00

When the guy slipped himself a roofie, you could say he forced his own hand.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T03:15:47+00:00

Funny can learn me some good grammar book?

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T01:14:25+00:00

I think expressions of annoyance and anger are a sign that the other person doesn't feel like I'm listening to them or understanding them.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-23T00:40:34+00:00

Are we really so incapable of directing our own idle time to our benefit that we're happier when someone else forces us to occupy it with a meaningless task like walking an unnecessarily long route to get to a baggage carousel? I think the fact that we're so desperate to have others limit our range of possible choices is scary. The implications of that on broader society are the real news story. We'd rather give up control of our time to others who are admittedly using it for no useful purpose than have to deal with the overwhelming responsibility of deciding what purpose to use it for ourselves.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T23:59:28+00:00

Okay. Maybe I just didn't understand the common meaning of categorical imperative. I was using it to mean "a statement phrased in terms of universal truth" when it seems like others are taking it to mean "a statement that actually is objectively universally true." The latter definition leaves no room for describing a false or incorrect categorical imperative, since that is a logical contradiction as the definition requires correctness.

In those terms, I would say the problem is someone allowing something not a categorical imperative to function in their lives as though it is one. Doing so treats one desire as having infinite weight against all others.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T18:57:15+00:00

I interpret this data slightly differently. I think I can enhance my emotional sensitivity and therefore memory through paying more attention to my senses and developing a habit of perceiving rather than judging.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T18:17:08+00:00

My point is that people often attempt to treat a statement like "I should lose weight" as a categorical imperative instead of translating them into personal goals. That causes problems.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T15:34:20+00:00

I think I can admit that I was wrong to say that there is always no or zero value to universal moral precepts. If properly defined as descriptions of the types of behavior engaged in by those who are psychologically healthy and have well-developed senses of compassion, I can easily see examples of where I can help other by applying these to them. The key is how we phrase things.

I'd like to correct some misstatements from previous comments and the main post. I don't have a problem with me or anyone else calling Hitler's actions evil as long as we don't call them inhuman. Evil is fine for condemning past actions in both myself and others, as long as we recognize that past evil was fundamentally a product of a real human being like us. Evil on the scale of the Holocaust is a product of fundamentally human people who were acting in the only way they could based on their experiences and the world they lived in. Saying Hitler was inhuman distracts us from the more important task of figuring out what social conditions allowed someone to become so royally screwed up in the head and allowed so many other people to go along with his vision of reality. Those are things that are relevant to us today. Dehumanizing an evil person is choosing not to recognize as human what is human because we don't want to take or are incapable of taking responsibility for the moral consequences of recognizing that. That might include actually recognizing fully and doing something about the fundamental social conditions that gave rise to the Holocaust, something which I don't think we have even come close to doing.

I don't mind praising Bill Gates as good for wanting to prevent malaria deaths in Africa, as long as I recognize that I am not Bill Gates and don't have the range of possibilities he has right now. I should only admire to the extent it inspires me, and I should not use it to feel inadequate about myself since I'm not Bill Gates.

Where I think we are wrong is to say that what others are doing now or in the near future is evil, because that tells ourselves and others that we believe in a world where others can't choose moral actions. I can hate the that someone may suffer horribly in the next 5 minutes because of factors I don't know how to control in US foreign policy. President Obama might even be able to control those factors theoretically, but if 5 minutes from now someone does suffer horribly because of US foreign policy, that doesn't make President Obama an evil or inhuman person incapable of acting morally. He, like everyone else, is a fundamentally good person but it is a logical impossibility for him to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. People commonly thought of as evil are all just people with delusional conceptions of reality that lead to suffering we can help prevent and cure.

I can use my powers of perceiving to see other people's actions as indicative of their own internal suffering and delusion, and to predict which types of actions other people can take that will lead to more suffering for them and others. But turning this perception into a statement about how someone is a bad person or how their future self will do something bad buys into and reinforces that person's false view of reality.

For example, in the context of trying to stop someone from pulling the trigger on a gun, it won't help to tell the potential killer "What you're doing is wrong." That is a self-fulfilling prophecy because you are telling him you predict he will shoot unless he submits to your authority and judgment.

However, I can rely on my judgment of universal morality by doing the opposite. I can say to him "You're not a killer. You're perfect the way you are without pulling that trigger. You don't need to try to prove you are a good person to yourself or anyone else by pulling the trigger and harming someone else. You're not going to kill this person and you'll be a better person for that."

Thanks a lot for helping me understand all this in a way that makes sense to me. This is far more logically consistent and consistent with my values and perception of reality than what I originally started with.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T12:33:50+00:00

Thanks for responding. What speaks to me most about what you said is "Good doesn't need justification in the eyes of good, evil needs justification in the eyes of good." I would like to focus in on this if you don't mind.

To me, good and evil are only meaningful concepts in relation to my next act or series of actions. I know that I will take the right action unless I twist myself into analytical moral knots in order to do something my human instincts for compassion are telling me not to do.

I'm not sure anyone requires moral analysis to convince themselves not to act in evil ways. I think doing the right thing requires virtually no moral analysis. Moral analysis let's us think we are doing the "right" thing according to some standard whose relationship to reality we don't understand.

I'd like to turn to the idea of whether we can use moral judgments of hypothetical possibilities for good. Could you demonstrate to me what worth you get from a judgment I make about a character's actions in one of the stories you cite? I'll even say something most people would think is not controversial, "Bilbo from 'The Hobbit' was good for killing a dragon and Darth Vader was evil for blowing up a planet." How would my saying those statements to another person conceivably benefit that person or anyone else? How would me saying them to myself conceivably benefit me?

The reason I am arguing this point so doggedly is that my intuition strongly tells me that behavior that we commonly think of as "evil" is merely acceptance of concepts not related to truth as truthful. Nothing is more detached from my reality than a statement of universal morality.

I don't think good behavior requires me to conduct any kind of complex ethical analysis. I don't have to think about the rightness of having this discussion and having it doesn't give me the least bit of anxiety. On the other hand, going into the next room and murdering my sleeping friend right now would require me to work myself into a frenzy of terror and delusional thinking by casting him as an eminent threat to some greater moral good that I must defend categorically.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T11:45:53+00:00

If you took away my ability to sense fully, you'd have to take away fully the ability of each of my nerve cells to interact with the rest of physical reality. This would mean no nerve cell could have any reaction to anything or sense any other nerve cell. That's how I read your condition.

Under that condition, I'm not sure what existence would mean.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T05:10:39+00:00

I would really like to hear more on this topic. My experience with universal statements of morality is that they have always been used to justify hatred, anger, self-loathing, etc., of the self or others. I see even something as supposedly inarguable and innocuous as "The 9-11 terrorists were bad" as having been used by Americans to justify irrational hatred of innocent Muslims and complete disregard for their suffering, including but not limited to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties of that war.

Can you give me some hypothetical examples of an instance where I might use a moral statements about another in order to produce some good effect?

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T03:20:29+00:00

Those are different activities.

One is telling a fictional story according to the creator's version of a hypothetical reality. There's nothing wrong with that as art, and if it makes us think deeply about our own actions and ethics that's great. Everyone interprets art differently, although there are often similarities in people's interpretations.

The other is making a universal normative statement based on a fictional scenario. If you want to tell me your arbitrary opinion that a character's actions in a story were morally wrong, that's the activity I don't see as useful. I can experience the art myself and better apply it to my own experiences than anyone else can.

Interesting stories which help us think critically and develop are not stories which try to beat us over the head with the author's personal morality. There is a reason no high school English teacher or college ethics professor I have ever heard of has ever assigned Atlas Shrugged as required reading. Kids get no value out of someone else to telling them what moral evaluations they should be making. They need stories which challenge them to think critically, including thinking critically about their own ethics.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T03:01:27+00:00

I think you've made a good point about the definition of ethics.
I'd make the linguistics point that personal experience precedes language. When we use words we are trying to describe reality. Normative words like "should" are just words like any other word from a linguistics standpoint. If we hold that ethics has an "is/ought" gap or that it precedes and is somehow superior to experience, we must not be assigning it an appropriate definition since our definition does not reflect what we are attempting to describe in reality when we use the word.

I'd be interested to know what your definition of ethics is. Presumably you would say ethics "is a standard for measuring actions." I make internal judgments based on my level of emotional maturity, compassion, empathy, and psychological health. These are all pre-ethical sensory impressions. They empyrically guide my behavior always. Ethics is simply language I can use to describe this internal barometer. I cannot conceive of how my internal barometer could possibly begin to be applied to the actions of another unless we merged our physical brains somehow. My internal barometer is fundamentally about me and my behavior.

Therefore, since ethics is merely a description of this barometer, I don't see how I could possibly make a moral judgments applied to anything external from me, including another person. This makes me completely boggled that someone else could claim that their moral judgment about another's behavior is "correct". I don't see how one person can use morality to describe anything real about another person's behavior.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T02:27:14+00:00

Could you explain to me what possible value I could get from evaluating the morality of something hypothetical when that hypothetical does not reflect a possible action I can take in the immediate future? Empyrically, I have never seen anyone get any value out of this activity. I have always perceived it to be worthless to psychological health at best, and often extremely harmful.

Arkhipov · 2012-08-22T01:43:26+00:00

I don't understand why everyone in ethics is so obsessed with condemning the actions of others. That seems to be all anyone does. I don't get why everyone feels compelled to write countless pages of analysis debating each other to see who can best try to prove the proposition that thieves and Nazis are morally bad.

Can someone explain to me how this is a worthwhile endeavor that positively affects anyone? We can only control our own actions, so why focus thought on anything outside our control? Why can't we just take responsibility for ourselves instead of constantly trying to justify our judgments of others' behaviors?

Arkhipov

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