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Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Agreeably vague

Did the concept of "agreeing to disagree" fall by the wayside, or has it morphed into "disagreeing to agree?"  Recent discussions have a familiar ring to me; I think I've seen this movie before and I'll continue to enjoy my time on the sidelines, munching my popcorn.

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The word beliefs was mentioned recently, as if it is important to know what others believe, and I don't think it matters as much as what they do.  According to Wikipedia, Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.

There you go, factual certainty not required.  And often, faith goes hand in hand with belief, so we continue to dance around the delusional mulberry bush that is the human mind,  We want things to get better, we hope and trust they will get better, so we apply our beliefs to do so and sometimes it works out well, other times not so well, and t'was ever thus.

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The point I think I'm trying to make is that some things can't be nailed down in specific terms or described in black and white.  Some things will always be vague and fuzzy, and there will be subtleties beyond our comprehension.  I can live with that; there is no compelling need for me to understand everything or resolve all contradictions.  My curiosity will be undiminished but that, too, is part of the journey and not the destination.  Feel free to disagree.

stealing bread

You know as a former hippie I took a bit of offense at being told how we adopted moral relativism in order to do wrong things, as if, if we wanted to do bad things we had to adopt some different moral code than the one we grew up with which was being good boys (and girls).  I am still waiting to hear what those wrong things were, and unless those things are different than drugs and sex, I fail to understand how Beagles, who has said he indulged in those same things (alcohol being a drug) is without sin while I am tarnished as the driven coal.  This is the third time I am asking.

From the wiki article Moral Absolutism is like what I call Stoicism, an act is good or bad in itself, and consequentialism is like utilitarianism where an action is judged by its results.  Beagles, who I would have pegged as an MA crosses into the utilitarianism camp when he steals that bread for his starving family.  One might well ask if he stole it from another starving family.  Which raises the interesting question is it then moral because your own family is more important to you than those strangers?  If not, then is it the right thing to do to let your family starve because the other family had it first and therefore it belongs to them?

If Beagles had the money to pay for the bread he stole he wouldn't have stolen it in the first place. This obligation to pay it  forward sounds specious.  It appears that Beagles himself is the judge of what act fulfills atonement and I don't think any judge in the county is going to accept that,  But since Beagles is a good boy, I guess he can always be trusted to do the right thing, as opposed to like a hippie, Man, who like can only be trusted to do wrong things,  And what makes Beagles a good boy, when he has yet to define what he means by being good?  Apparently because he says so.


Back in the 60s colonialism was considered a very bad thing, there were still some colonies then which have since then been freed and have they vaulted into proud first world because now they are free and can chart their own course over God's green Earth?  They have not.  Compare the countries that have been colonized with those that haven't, and you won't see any big differences, The Brits were mighty proud of the sun never setting on their empire but eventually they realized that it was cheaper and more efficient to just buy and sell their crap on the world market than from a bunch of pesky colonies that were always pissing and moaning and revolting.

The Amerindians of today have nice shirts and pants and smartphones and all, but they drink a lot and life on the res is awfully drab.  Likely they were happier before the white man than they are now. And so it goes with much of the third world, I think.  But unless we define better than when, and what makes a person better off the discussion is much too vague.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The Law of Beagles

"Moral relativism may be any of several philosophical positions concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. Descriptive moral relativism holds only that some people do in fact disagree about what is moral; meta-ethical moral relativism holds that in such disagreements, nobody is objectively right or wrong; and normative moral relativism holds that because nobody is right or wrong, we ought to tolerate the behavior of others even when we disagree about the morality of it.

Moral absolutism is an ethical view that particular actions are intrinsically right or wrong. Stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done for the well-being of others (e.g., stealing food to feed a starving family), and even if it does in the end promote such a good. Moral absolutism stands in contrast to other categories of normative ethical theories such as consequentialism, which holds that the morality (in the wide sense) of an act depends on the consequences or the context of the act.
Moral absolutism is not the same as moral universalism (also called moral objectivism). Universalism holds merely that what is right or wrong is independent of custom or opinion (as opposed to moral relativism), but not necessarily that what is right or wrong is independent of context or consequences (as in absolutism). Moral universalism is compatible with moral absolutism, but also positions such as consequentialism." - (copied right from Wikipedia)

I may not have known what I was talking about there, but that's never stopped me before. After first shooting from the hip, I went back and looked it up. Well, better late than never. As it turned out, "moral relativism" means exactly what I thought it meant, but "moral absolutism" was a poor choice of words on my part. What I should have called it was "moral universalism" or "moral objectivism".

Under the Law of Beagles, it might be permissible to steal in order to feed a starving family, but then I would feel obligated to either pay it back or pay it forward, if and when the opportunity presented itself to do so. My first choice would be to reimburse the person from whom I stole. If that was not possible, my second choice would be to help somebody else who found himself in desperate circumstances so that he would not be reduced to stealing as I had been. Something like that shouldn't have to be looked up in a book, it should just come natural to a good person, which I believe myself to be.

I think what started me out as to be a good person was the way my parents and other adults kept telling me that I was a good boy when I was little. To be fair, I was sickly as a toddler and probably didn't have the energy to be bad. As I grew older and my health improved, I began to have doubts about my inherent goodness, so I asked God to make me better. Maybe He did, or maybe the fact that I asked Him to indicates that He had made me good in the first place and I just needed to be reminded of that. For whatever reason, I have always believed myself to be a good person, except for when I briefly fell off the wagon when I was 11 years old. I'm not sure what happened there, it might have been puberty or temporary insanity which, when you think about it, are one in the same thing. Some years later, it became fashionable in some circles to be bad, or at least pretend to be bad. I never bought into that. I knew who I was by then, and I had no desire to change sides.

I'm not so sure that people in Third World countries are any worse off now than they've ever been. Most of them have secured independence from their colonial overlords in our lifetimes. That's got to be a good thing, right? Before they were colonized, they lived in a state of tribal feudalism, and some of them have reverted to that. Although, as Uncle Ken has previously pointed out, most people would rather be oppressed by their own kind than by foreigners, so they must be happier now than they were before. Some of them were the center of mighty empires in their day, but empires are transitory, they rise and they fall. I think that most Italians are happier now than their imperial Roman ancestors were. In those days, most of them would have been slaves or soldiers. I have never been a slave, but I have been a soldier. It wasn't so bad, but I never re-enlisted, which tells you something.






Moral Absolutism - The Age of Beagles

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?

Monday, May 1, 2017

Moral Absolutism

It just occurred to me that some of the same arguments that are used to debate objective realism could be used to debate moral absolutism. The hypothetical tree in Uncle Ken's yard does not exist because people believe it exists, it's exists independent of belief or perception. Similarly, although people's opinions and beliefs about right and wrong may vary, a moral absolutist believes that the existence of good and evil is not dependent on people's beliefs. Of course, that in itself is a belief but, if it's not true, then it is the belief that is in error, not the intrinsic existence of good and evil. God and Satan are the cultural personifications of good and evil but, even if God and Satan turn out to be fictional characters, good and evil still exist in their own right, just as objective reality exists in its own right. Indeed, objective reality includes good and evil, just like it includes everything else in existence. If there really are no good guys or bad guys in the world, it's just because nobody has gotten it right yet.

When we discuss whether or not the world is better off today than it used to be, do we mean the whole world on average, or do we mean only certain groups of people? By some accounts, the poor people of today are better off than the rich people were a long time ago. It has been said that the richest Roman emperor who ever lived didn't have a shirt on his back or a decent pair of pants to wear. Well, I suppose there are still some people in the world who don't have that, so maybe that's not the best example, but you get the idea. There is a lot of talk these days about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Is that what we're talking about, or are we saying that the poor people of today are worse off than poor people used to be?

I have wondered about the claim that unvaccinated people increase the risk of vaccinated people getting the disease. If the vaccine doesn't protect you from the disease, then what good is it? Then again, birth control is not 100% effective either, but it's more effective than not using birth control, so maybe that's the logic. I got all my shots when I was a kid, but there weren't as many shots to get in those days as there are now. I remember that there were three "childhood diseases": measles, mumps, and chicken pox, that you were supposed to try to get as a child because it was worse if you got them later in life. I understand that they vaccinate against all three today which, I suppose is safer if it works.

Far out, man

Moral relativism was invented by the hippies back in the 60s so they could do wrong things and not feel guilty about it.

I don't get it.  Although not popularized until the 20th century, moral relativism goes way back to Plato and earlier. I don't know how it relates to hippies; they did plenty of illegal things, mostly relating to drugs, but that doesn't make them wrong things.  What's the beef with hippies, Mr. Beagles?   Was that small subset of your fellow baby boomers a threat to you or were they too weird?  I can't see them as being much more than a temporary cultural anomaly, an often self-centered expression of youthful inquiry much like many others throughout history and a product of the times.  In retrospect, and after a quick scan of the Wikipedia page, I'll have to conclude that the whole hippie stuff made a positive impact on the world as we know it today.  Other opinions may differ, and different doesn't mean wrong.  Maybe it's relative.

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The point of the link to the Amazon reviews was not for you to read the book, Uncle Ken.  I'm not going to read the book either, but there were enough bullet points mentioned and review comments that it shouldn't be necessary.  Things are better, I think, unless you can provide hard data that proves otherwise.  I concede that there are isolated areas where things are much worse, but overall the situation is much improved.

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I was going to comment on fact that many recent discussions are revolving about moral dilemmas, again, but fuck it, the discussions never seem to arrive at any consensual conclusion.  Is it just me, am I no longer being reasonable?

the return of the crucible

Over my wild and crazy weekend I didn't  get around to checking out  any of Old Dog's links.  I don't know, one appeared to be a book, and I'm not going to read a whole book.  Maybe Old Dog can quote where in the book it refutes my contention that the world has gotten worse for third world folks and that due to massive pollution and itchy fingers on weapons of mass destruction we teeter much closer to wiping ourselves out than we did when we were wondering should we plant those seeds and hang around or should we grab our spears and head off to the wild and free hunt.

As for people hallucinating their own realities, well that is something we already knew isn't it?  And no matter how much we hallucinate there either is or isn't a tree in my backyard so Objective Reality stands.  Unless you dabble in quantum mechanics, but none of those effects extend to anything larger than oh, twenty or thirty molecules.


I'll just refute Beagles's first sentence by saying that I was a hippie in the 60s and no we didn't. Actually I wonder what he means when he uses the expression moral relativism.  I wonder what were those wrong things that hippies were doing.  I am going to assume sex and drugs because that is the usual bad rap on hippies, but wasn't Beagles at this time. looking down disapprovingly from his high tower of Internalized Moral Code, getting loaded frequently and having sex whenever he had the opportunity?

Do we have a right to believe whatever we want?  I think the crux of the argument  Beagles and I had on this subject is I think if you have some kind of belief you have a responsibility to have it examined logically, to submit it to the (ahem) crucible, whereas Beagles didn't feel like he had use any stinking crucibles he had a right to believe whatever he wanted.  That's my memory of it, Beagles may want to correct me.

I am thinking of those anti vaxxers.  They have this belief because of some anecdotal evidence and there are some minor celebrities and some websites.  Well some people believe in astrology and crystals and stuff, isn't this the land of the free?

Except that now those childhood diseases which had been pretty much wiped out in the first world are coming back because the anti vaxxers are leaving their kids vulnerable and their kids get the disease and pass it on to kids who have been vaccinated.  Vaccinated kids can still get the disease though it is much less likely, but if everybody is vaccinated the disease is not around for anybody to get.

So there are your anti vax neighbors with their virus farm kid Vinnie, and you don't want your Mary who has been vaccinated for Measles to get it from Vinnie.  Do you have a right  to drop in on them with your evidence?  Do they have a right to slam the door in your face?