I was all set this morning to argue why Beagles with his Internalized Moral Code was walking the straight and narrow while getting loaded and getting sex whenever he could, while those damned hippies with their Moral Relativism were leading lives of perdition with their getting stoned and getting sex whenever they could, but that appears to be in the rearview mirror, and instead we have something called Moral Absolutism. Moral Relativism has never been defined and now we have Moral Absolutism, which apparently is a belief that good and evil have always existed, Perhaps this could be debated but thus far good and evil appear to be defined by things that Beagles likes and doesn't like, and so Moral Absolutism could not have existed until Beagles himself existed, and will end when Beagles himself ends.
And does Old Dog want me to believe what he says a book says, which is just what he thinks it says because he didn't read it himself, because it generated bullet points and good reviews? This is like when you are having an argument and all of a sudden the other guy says studies show blah blah blah and now the argument is on hold while you have to look up which studies (and in nine times out of ten the guy saying studies show cannot name any specific ones). The way I see it we are like three guys in a bar having an argument in the days before smartphones. You bring what you have in your own mind to the argument and you don't step out to get a book to buttress your argument.
Are we better off now than an unspecified time long ago/ Most people in the first world are, most people in the third world aren't, how do we measure how many are in each group? How do we measure how much worse off or better off they are? How do we do that arithmetic? One measure commonly used is mortality, and did you know that last year US mortality rose?
The idea that Caesar was less well off than us because he didn't have a nice shirt or pants with a zipper is ludicrous, but it's true that we certainly have more stuff than we used to, and that seems to be the way that better off is measured these days, so if you want to use that measure, fine, we are better off. If you want to measure by happiness which seems to make more sense - what would you rather be, happy or the owner of a bunch of crap? - then probably we are not much better off than before. Of course we have never defined before when, which makes the whole discussion kind of empty.
I had to look up that thing about vaccinated people having a small chance of getting the disease because I wasn't sure of it myself. But anyway if everybody is vaccinated the virus has nowhere to go and nobody gets sick, whereas if some are unvaccinated the virus is around to infect the small number of vaccinated who are vulnerable.
So is Old Dog complaining that our discussions never come to any conclusions? That we never hammer out a paper that we can all sign our names to and add that to annals of Beaglesonia? That after four long years of tippy tapping, the annals are without a chapter, a scrap of paper, a grocery list for Chrissake? Well how often have the Friday night seminars ended with Old Dog or Uncle Ken, shaking their heads and saying, well you know what, you are right and I am wrong? .
Actually I think that may have happened once or twice though I daresay I can't give the specifics. To me the whole idea of discussion is that it opens the mind, you have to deal with what other people believe and in stating what you believe you have to examine it more closely.
Maybe it's just me. but I like the arguments best. I don't mind the yarns. But I get bored with the history lessons which I could just go to wiki and read there.
So how do the dawgs feel about it? What are their favorite discussion topics, what would they like to see more of in these unived halls?
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