Understanding Ethical/Moral Theory

http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=193920

urgod wrote:“morality” is the false deification or primacy of one value over others and without having engaged in that comparison and ranking of values with each other. Morality is nothing more than a word for how people refuse to actually engage their values honestly in relative terms of each other.

a naturalistic objectivist who's inverted an egoistic emotivist theory into a deontological theory of subjectivism.

wtf? *scratches head*

he holds that moral judgements can be true or false, based on the motive from which an act is done, but that moral statements of value can also be right or wrong... objective in the sense that they express the psychology of the person who utters them, a person who has a duty to value certain things imperatively.

that won't fly because it is laden with contradiction.

let's look at it:

“morality” is the false deification or primacy of one value over others and without having engaged in that comparison and ranking of values with each other.

first, how does one determine the ranking of values, and, how does he know that a person who has given 'primacy of one value over another' hasn't engaged in making comparisons between their values?

obviously they have, because they hold some value more important than some other value. is he then saying that only he is able to rank values properly, and that anyone else who ranks values is making improper comparisons?

now he admits that values exist and statements about them can be true or false (naturalism), but then he implies that the order of values are subjectively created, expressing, or motivated by, one's psychological disposition (egoistic emotivism). then he implies that there is a proper order of values (deontological... this is his VO speaking) that are determined subjectively, provided that one 'engages' properly.

Morality is built on an emotional foundation, it is basically a half-emotion that stirs up your feelings at certain times when you would otherwise be required to engage in a value analysts and hierarchizing of values but instead the emotion of morality hits you and destroys your attempt to more deeply understand and rank your values.

emotivism, again, but with a hint of objective categorical imperative in the naturalistic sense, a ruling that can't be reached by virtue of the subjective ranking of values.

he has generated an impossible combination of diametrically opposed theories here, though i don't think the poor fellow knows it.

andy, go give the lad a hand.

you guys are talking past each other, quibbling over what 'rules' are.

there are two ways to establish moral 'rules' objectively; two ways to prove such rules exist whether or not people recognize them, believe in them, agree on them, or practice them.

one is to show that god exists, who would sanction the rules. but then you are faced with a new dilemma. does god make the rules because they are good, or are the rules good because god has made them. in the first case, god loses his omnipotence, because what is 'good' is not something that he has chosen by fiat to determine. in the second case, you'd have to prove that god is benevolent, not just that what god has deemed 'good' must be an act of benevolence. it may very well be the case that what is 'good' is actually 'bad', but because it is the will of god, we believe it must be 'good'.

the second way is to try what kant tried. make moral facts not only naturalistic facts (real statements that can be true or false), but also deontological facts (real statements that are not only true or false, but also representative of real right or wrong actions).

remember there is a big difference between a moral statement being true or false, and a moral statement expressing a state of rightness or wrongness.

anyway, if the people engaged in this argument are not kantian motivists, then rules are simply conventions. if the people are verificationists, then moral statements cannot be either true or false, but only nonsensical. if the people are consequentialists, then only the effects of moral acts matter, and their position is in either a hedonistic form or an agathistic form.

UrGod is an imbecile now absorbed by the van clan.
Why would anyone take anything this imbecile posts seriously?
He's now a he-bitch for the new Messiah....
It's the quality of minds he can get.
Sycophants and degenerates. A service to us all.....we can now keep track of them. They are all in pools.

Pezer is still waiting for the cRAP career he was promised.

Morality refers to a behaviour evolved to facilitate heterosexual reproduction and cooperative survival strategies.
It then became memetic....by being used to politically control populations.

Genetics morphed into memetics.
Each moral system is a reference to an idea(l) espoused by the founding elites of the group.
Some are in alignment with genetics and others in contradiction.
Ten Commandments established the first morality based theocracy to facilitate closed group strategies, like those practiced by Jews, Gypsies, Quakers, etc.

Like how gender politics evolved from reproduction specialization - male/female.
The meme gives the specialized reproductive role its own symbols, metaphors, names, to direct its behaviour to accord with the group's shared ideals.
Gender is how naturally evolved sexual types are applies within a particular culture - some closer, in harmony, and some further, in contradiction, to the original.

andy wrote:I think it's excessive to say that rules do not exist. Just consider what a rule is. An example would be a conditional statement such as "if you kill someone, the police will arrest you".

that's not a rule, but it is a conditional statement... and can also be a condition of reality provided that a murderer gets arrested for murder somewhere at some time.

the rule would simply be 'don't kill someone', but the condition 'the police will arrest you' is not a rule... since people kill people all the time without being arrested. it's a conditional, like you said.

now if you said instead 'if you kill someone, you will commit an immoral act', and were able to show that killing someone is, indeed, immoral, you'd have a rule that was founded on something more than convention and supported by something more than conditionals.

but even then, someone need not follow the rule even while knowing the act is immoral. the rule could be broken, and if a rule is broken, it wouldn't matter that it existed. we should think of rules as directives that can't be altered and are always followed. clearly, if a rule is broken, what does it matter to call the prohibition of an act, a rule?

to say 'x is a rule' really means 'you don't have to follow x, but there will be consequences if you don't, as well.'

so rules are arbitrary, unless you are talking about rules that can't be broken without fundamentally changing the circumstances in which they are applied. like a game, for example. if the rules aren't followed, the game isn't being played right... so you're no longer playing the game... but doing something else. this isn't the case with morality. if you don't follow a moral rule, you're still acting morally.

I think we will all agree that a rule such as "if you kill someone, the police will arrest you" exists pretty much in every country in the world whereas a rule such as "if you kill someone, the police will make you rich" has no match in reality. The first rule exists whereas the second one does not.

i don't agree. murderers aren't always arrested, and crooked police have paid hitmen to kill people, before.

but neither of these are 'rules', anyway.

satyr wrote:Morality refers to a behaviour evolved to facilitate heterosexual reproduction and cooperative survival strategies.

i absolutely agree, though i'd leave out the 'facilitate heterosexual reproduction' because that's already under the rubric of cooperative survival strategy. you'd leave it out because there is plenty of homosexual behavior in nature that promotes cooperative survival strategy in some way... or else it wouldn't exist.

every behavior is evolved, and either serves some function toward cooperative behavior, or is vestigial, meaning, it doesn't promote, but it doesn't endanger, either. you wouldn't be able to say 'homosexuality endangers the survival of the species' because he's so gay. everyone would have to be gay for that to become a problem.

Zoot wrote:that's not a rule, but it is a conditional statement... and can also be a condition of reality provided that a murderer gets arrested for murder somewhere at some time.

Alright, if you say so.

the rule would simply be 'don't kill someone', but the condition 'the police will arrest you' is not a rule... since people kill people all the time without being arrested. it's a conditional, like you said.

I agree that's a rule. That would be an example of an unconditional rule i.e. a kind of rule that applies under all conditions. In practice, that would mean that people never ever perform certain kind of action (e.g. kill other people.)

now if you said instead 'if you kill someone, you will commit an immoral act', and were able to show that killing someone is, indeed, immoral, you'd have a rule that was founded on something more than convention and supported by something more than conditionals.

Roughly speaking, the word "immoral" means "bad (in some regard)". It is a reference to something that you do not want to happen i.e. something that you want to prevent.

i don't agree. murderers aren't always arrested, and crooked police have paid hitmen to kill people, before.

That means that my statement isn't exactly true but only approximately true. If you want it to be exactly true, I'd have to change it. But we must ask: is that necessary? I don't think so. It's true enough to be useful as an example.

I agree that's a rule. That would be an example of an unconditional rule i.e. a kind of rule that applies under all conditions. In practice, that would mean that people never ever perform certain kind of action (e.g. kill other people.)

excellent opportunity for us to delve into a much more complicated situation. first, that rule does not apply under all conditions. capital punishment, abortion (maybe), war, self defense, etc. all justified acts of murder.

then justifying murder is the problem. there are two basic approaches to this; utilitarian and deontological. the former is a consequentialism; it would justify or not justify all those acts of murder based on whether or not it could be shown that to do so, or not, would result in a greater good for everyone. there are a lot of crafty arguments in utilitarianism which could go either way, depending on the utilitarian in question and how slick he is.

the deontological approach, if you ask me, is completely futile, because you would never find a real world in which everyone 'acts as if their action would become a universal law', as kant put it. simply, not everyone will have have to decide whether or not to give the death penalty, or whether or not to perform an abortion, or decide whether or not to kill an enemy soldier, or decide if they should shoot to kill to defend themselves.

deontological theory is PERFECTLY impractical in every way.

so you either attempt a utilitarian justification for your rule, or become an emotivist like me and the positivist boys. the fact is, moral statements are not descriptions at all... not even descriptions of one's feelings. they are expressions of feelings much to the same effect as a grunt of pleasure after eating a pizza is an expression of satisfaction. so it is a mistake to say that moral judgements, which express feelings, are true or false. one wouldn't say a grunt of pleasure is true or false because it isn't a statement.

somebody pulls a gun on you. you shout 'ahhhhhhhck, don't shoot me, bro!!!'

we can't say shooting you is right or wrong, nor even that you think it's right or wrong. we can only observe from andy's request that he doesn't want to get blasted on, and that he prefers the dude not shoot him.

Zoot Allures wrote:

satyr wrote:Morality refers to a behaviour evolved to facilitate heterosexual reproduction and cooperative survival strategies.

i absolutely agree, though i'd leave out the 'facilitate heterosexual reproduction' because that's already under the rubric of cooperative survival strategy. you'd leave it out because there is plenty of homosexual behavior in nature that promotes cooperative survival strategy in some way... or else it wouldn't exist.

every behavior is evolved, and either serves some function toward cooperative behavior, or is vestigial, meaning, it doesn't promote, but it doesn't endanger, either. you wouldn't be able to say 'homosexuality endangers the survival of the species' because he's so gay. everyone would have to be gay for that to become a problem.

I only mention it because it preceded cooperative survival strategies, and may not evolve into one....like bears, or coyotes, or fox...and organisms like that.

A groups value system is based on its ideals....but not all ideals are realistic, or fit.
World is the final arbiter of what is superior and what is inferior, or how each value system, each ideal, manifests in reality as a type of organism.
Each idea is validated in relation to a natural order which is indifferent to all judgments, and all ideals.
This to correct the degenerates who believe that if you believe in something with a passion, if you will it, it becomes real.

wikipedia wrote:Utilitarian philosopher Richard Brandt offered several criticisms of emotivism in his 1959 book Ethical Theory. His first is that "ethical utterances are not obviously the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are, and prima facie, at least, should be viewed as statements." He thinks that emotivism cannot explain why most people, historically speaking, have considered ethical sentences to be "fact-stating" and not just emotive. Furthermore, he argues that people who change their moral views see their prior views as mistaken, not just different, and that this does not make sense if their attitudes were all that changed:

Suppose, for instance, as a child a person disliked eating peas. When he recalls this as an adult he is amused and notes how preferences change with age. He does not say, however, that his former attitude was mistaken. If, on the other hand, he remembers regarding irreligion or divorce as wicked, and now does not, he regards his former view as erroneous and unfounded. … Ethical statements do not look like the kind of thing the emotive theory says they are.

pretty slick there, brandt, but not slick enough.

a child accumulates no new data about the authenticity of his experience of not liking peas. there is no doubt that he disliked them as a kid. on the other hand, his move from viewing divorce as okay into viewing divorce as wicked, results from opinions that are able to be changed by new information.

brandt has created a false dilemma for a non-problem. ethical statements may not look like what emotivists say they are, but they still are. the person feels that their former views on divorce were mistaken only because his understanding of his opinions have changed. in the same way, the person's tastes have changed, and now they like peas.

in neither case are either of the people 'mistaken' after having changed. one can't be mistaken for believing divorce is okay if 'okay' only means 'i feel satisfied in believing divorce is okay just like i felt satisfied eating peas as a child.'

same stuff, different context. one expresses physical tastes, the other, an attitude. the satisfaction experienced in having an attitude is equivalent to the satisfaction experienced in physical pleasure.

When man tries to impose upon nature his own moral and idealistic codes there is always a collateral effect equal to the degree his ideals contradict natural order and already evolved behaviours.

We can gauge this by how many rules and laws man has to invent to contradict natural dispositions.

The collateral effects can be anything from psychological effects to physical ones, like unfit mutations that require constant intervention to be maintained.
Like what man produces when he imposes his desired environment upon natural ones - pollution.
Collateral effect necessitate further interventions which then produce more collateral effects, until the system collapses because the energies required to maintain itself exceed the energies it can harvest.


Usually nihilistic ideals have to lie to survive in a world that is indifferent to their ideals.
Christianity, for example, cannot be lived, it can only function with the invention of sin.
Christians constantly contradict their own principles and values and morals, because they would die if they tried to live in accordance with them...so they live a lie, six days a week, and then ask for forgiveness on the seventh.
An ingenious system of hypocrisy and pretentiousness, characteristic of all nihilistic dogmas, beginning with the spiritual trio = Abrahamic.

Marxists invented another, ingenious system.
when they failed to live according to their own values, or to establish them, they blamed it on others....and slaughtered or imprisoned them.
The error was never the ideology, but always those who failed to live up to it.

Jews invented another lie.
To explain why they denied their delusional, inverted, word-based, salvation to the slaves of other tribes, they invented the category of choseness.....they took the burden of man's sins to save man....you see? So it wasn't they who invent this delusion to invert their status from slave to master, but it was forced upon them by.....yes....God.
They were chosen to suffer on behalf of mankind...must as Jesus later sacrificed himself for the sins of ALL men, in other words he made judaism accessible to all tribes.
All of it is a big lie.

Zoot wrote:that rule does not apply under all conditions. capital punishment, abortion (maybe), war, self defense, etc. all justified acts of murder.

Okay. So when you say "Don't do X" you don't mean to say "Don't do X under any condition" but "Don't do X except under certain conditions". In other words, the statement is a conditional one rather than an unconditional one.

the fact is, moral statements are not descriptions at all... not even descriptions of one's feelings. they are expressions of feelings much to the same effect as a grunt of pleasure after eating a pizza is an expression of satisfaction. so it is a mistake to say that moral judgements, which express feelings, are true or false. one wouldn't say a grunt of pleasure is true or false because it isn't a statement.

Moral statements describe a preference for certain kind of behavior. Such a preference either exists in reality or it does not.

The sound that you make after eating pizza is certainly not a verbal sign but it is nonentheless a sign, a non-verbal one. It means something. And what it means is an empirical matter. For example, it may or may not mean that you enjoyed the pizza.

Okay. So when you say "Don't do X" you don't mean to say "Don't do X under any condition" but "Don't do X except under certain conditions". In other words, the statement is a conditional one rather than an unconditional one.

well yeah, i was pointing out that you said 'a rule that applies under all conditions.'

universally applicable categorical imperatives can't seem to be found anywhere but in churches and on kant's book shelf, but hypothetical imperatives are everywhere. if you want to achieve x, do y. simple enough. but the categorical imperative states that one should do y because doing y, in itself, is good, regardless of whether or not it achieves x. this makes no sense to me, or, it is circular, if it does make sense; do y to achieve 'doing what is good (x)'. but why is x good?

Moral statements describe a preference for certain kind of behavior. Such a preference either exists in reality or it does not.

emotivists argue that, in fact, there are no such things as 'moral statements' at all. a statement such as 'kicking satyr in the ear is wrong' is non-cognitive, meaning the predicate 'wrong' doesn't describe any feature about the world. the statement would have to be tacitly interpreted to mean 'andy probably won't kick satyr in the ear', or 'andy doesn't want satyr to get kicked in the ear', something like that.

Nobody 'kicks me in the ear'....except in thir fantasies.
I'm only glad I played a tiny teeny part in making people question how they use words and what language is.
Self-immunization begins by understanding the virus, so that charlatans selling mind-farting, bullshyte no longer have a leg to stand on.

Morality is a word misused and abused.
For degenerates it is either sent by God (metaphor for absolute), in the form of tablets (Abrahamism), or it a human invention out of nowhere and nothing (post-modern cultural Marxism).
There is a third option that needs no will to fabricate the behaviours we associate with morality.

From GENES to MEMES.......
Morality evolved and then was manipulated by humans to direct socially acceptable behaviours, in relation to a goal, an objective, an idea(l).
Man does not invent morality, he manipulates it.

satyr wrote:Nobody 'kicks me in the ear'....except in their fantasies.

not even tim man?

After centuries of Abrahamic brainwashing teaching selflessness, as a self-sacrifice to the omnipotent ONEness, be it abstract Idea(l), or Humanity made into abstract Idea(l), the selling of selfishness as a groundbreaking radicalism to those who were raised to feel ashamed of being selfish, is to be expected.
But we must fully define what 'self' is in the duality of bipolar psychosis 'selfish/selfless'.
It's the same as 1/0, or absolute order versus absolute chaos....while existence is the in-between - gradations.

Self, pragmatically defined is the continuum, connected by memory, and I've explained how to use words like ego/self/Self to represent its parts: lucid-conscious/subconscious/innate-genetic.
Nobody can be selfless....because every thing you do or think, your every interaction is an expression of self, and therefore selfish, whether you know it or not.
Even self-sacrifice is a selfish act.
Selfless is a delusion, attempting to distance self from self - identifying with an-otherness.
it's rooted in herd psychology where the group supersedes the individual as an identifier.
This was natural when the group was genetically homogeneous, but more problematic in modern systems when the group is an idea, and genetically heterogeneous.
The idea(l) represents the lowest-common-denominator that can fabricate uniformity.
Projection of 'self' as otherness....its negation in other - other replacing self.
The word 'self' represents a concept that indicates a continuum, a chain of causality, stretching across time/space, and connected by memory - where there is no stored memory directing/informing the manifestation of this continuum as presence, the word 'self' does not apply.
Therefore 'self' only applies to living unities with intent.

Self cannot invent its own values.
I mean it can, but its invention has to be applicable in world, and it is world that determines their validity.
Doesn't matter how passionately you will it, it is world that determines the consequences of your idealistic application - the costs/benefits.

If you idealize retardation then you will face the consequences...not another, but YOU.
If you live in your own private reality and ignore, or dismiss reality, it is you who will suffer, not another.
Ideals must relate to a viable, application, otherwise it remains theoretical.
Ideals are not all equal....natural selection applies.
Each intervention upon natural order has collateral effects that require further interventions....producing pollutants that have to be cleaned-up or they will bury you.

If we think of the idea(l) as a projection of a noetic objective, then its attainment is determined by how realistic this idea(l) is...and the movement towards it determines the kind of individual you become.

In Abrahamism the idea(l) is supernatural, unapproachable, intentionally unattainable to then produce the desire sense of inadequacy, shame, that is used to control the masses.
The idea(l) cannot be lived-up to, so all who live are beneath it.

Nobody can be selfless....because every thing you do or think, your every interaction is an expression of self, and therefore selfish, whether you know it or not.

not only that, but many evolutionary biologists and psychologists argue that pure selflessness isn't an evolutionarily stable strategy (we'll call it an ESS). this means that it simply wouldn't work in any community of animals, including humans.

i believe it was dawkins who came up with a model to explain how this works. you've got three types of birds; grudgers, cheats, and suckers.

(x) a grudger is a bird that will pick the mites off another bird if that bird has picked the mites off of him.

(y) a cheat is a bird that lets other birds pick mites off him, but doesn't pick mites off any other bird.

(z) a sucker picks mites off of other birds regardless of whether or not they pick mites off of him.

in a community of y and z, z would eventually die off, from mite infestation, leaving only y. following this, y would eventually die off as well, because y doesn't pick mites off others.

in a community of z and x, both would prosper.

in a community of y and x, y would die off.

dawkins used this as an analogy of certain kinds of memes that propagate forms of altruism. a society that advocates unconditional charity, for instance, would be synonymous to a community of z and y. likewise, a society that advocates extreme forms of individualism would be like a society of y. neither of these societies have an ESS.

the only exceptions would be societies of ONLY z, or ONLY x, but not ONLY y.

so, either EVERYONE must be selfless, or, no more than half can be selfless, provided the other half is x and not y.

conclusion: total altruism, or none at all. rather a kind of mediated altruism based on reciprocity.

arcturus descending wrote:

UrGod wrote:
Overcoming morality leads to a kind of purity, a freedom. In contrast, moralistic people are small, boring, unthoughtful, unfree, and generally just annoying as fuck.

So, what is missing from your equation?

Hitler, the Nazi pigs, the Storm Troopers, the Islamic terrorist groups, the bullies of the world ~ they all overcame morality.

I am not saying that you are but you almost sound like one of them.

see that?! but one could also say all those she mentions had a more severe morality than anyone else.

this is a prime example of a symptom of an environment of normative ethics that has been developed after centuries of ideological or memetic programing. a linear progression of this might look like:

christianity > utilitarianism > democracy > altruism

the final result identifies any other morality as either immoral, or amoral.

If God did not give man abrahamic laws of socioeconomic conduct, then man invents them out of nowhere, might is right....as the cunt cAnus, would say.
It's an either/or scenario.....if not absolute order then absolute chaos. There is no in-between, no alternative.
Bipolar, binary simplicity for simpletons, trying to evade reality's degrees and uncertainties.

Either God, as a projection of man's ideal self, invented morality for man, or man steps out of the shadows, to reveal his duplicity, and present himself as the maker of moral laws.
All is subjective.....a product of a conscious will.
That morality evolved to facilitate certain survival strategies and then was manipulated by humans, is beyond their ability to accept.

So, gender is also invented by man...a social construct, as is race....you see?
Human replaced God...but not really.
God was renamed Humanity.....because the abstract has no reference and so is uninhibited by an indifferent world.
It can become anything....imagined in any way that gratifies needs.

Did you see the Messiah's understanding of martial arts?
It's that kind of magical thinking that is at work here.
Romanticism, idealism, freed from natural order....from pragmatism, from precedent.
Nurture = sum of nurturing.
Precedent = memory.
Detach mind form past, much to its relief, and you make it malleable, easily manipulated and exploited by those who sell what they do not buy into themselves - hypocrisy.
Then use language to impress and dominate their lostness, promising them grand things, like power, sex, infamy, riches, occult knowledge.....a desperate mind grasps at anything.

I call them men-children.
Boyish in a charming way....dangerous if permitted to become serious with their mind-games.
Morality was not invented by humans. Other species display a rudimentary moral essence of altruism and reciprocity....social species....giving us a clue as to why and how it evolved.
Then man takes this and manipulates it for his own ends.

Conspiracies do not invent reality, they exploit a existing one.
Nihilism was not invented by man, it was a psychology evolving when man began to awaken to reality, and was manipulated by men.

in the west Nihilism followed a moralizing path to promote desirable behaviours....
Nihilistic are those that contradict naturally evolved disposition of the homo sapient species.
Ten Commandments onward....Theocracy contra Timocracy....

Morality was invented by the Greeks. It is a form of aesthetics, taste.