Sab,
Like it was defined in the The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995:
"[Ethics is] is the philosophical study of morality
Not wanting tomake a chicken or the egg argument, but morals first and then ethics.
Moral Rigidity vs Ethical Rigidity
by sabastious 33 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Naddia_the_Godless
Sabastious said: So what Plato was referring to was the existence of Natural(absolute) Law, correct?
Plato believed in the reality of the Universe. We as humans are not able to fully see or grasp this nature because we are limited by our subjective perceptions, but the reality is out there. Through the Forms, knowledge filters down to us, so by the time it reaches us we have only an abstraction of that reality.
Beauty, for example, exists in an absolute sense, a Form. Beauty is real. It’s here whether you’re here to observe it or not. What you experience as beauty is an abstraction. How closely your concept of beauty relates to the true Form of beauty determines whether or not your perception is correct, but ultimately it’s something you cannot know entirely.
The same is true of Justice. There is an absolute Form of Justice. We may not always know what is best, but the closer we get to “real” justice, the better we will fair. It’s a metaphysical approach to ethics, but it doesn’t invoke a god. In Plato’s vision, philosophers, not religious leaders, would best be able to determine what laws would align with the Forms. It’s also interesting to note that the ancient Greeks did not view same sex relationships as immoral.
Aristotle took a more physical approach to natural law. He didn’t believe in Plato’s Forms, but he did believe in essences of forms. The physical universe is made up of physical forms, and those forms each have their own essence. Its essence is its reality, its true nature. Therefore, the closer you can get to understanding the essence of any given thing, the more you can align yourself with nature.
Centuries later, Paul’s writings in the New Testament indicate that he may have been familiar with natural law and Greek philosophy. He makes reference to “unnatural” acts, or leaving behind one’s nature. Something to that effect.
You said: Then Aquinas immediately blows the concept when referring to homosexuality as an "unnatual act." He was very wrong so his forumla was obviously flawed or he didn't uphold it. Since the misstep was made on the topic of homosexuality I would guess that he made the ancient mistake of taking his own ideas and attributed them to God. Which is a mistake we all make including me.
Well, Aquinas came along over 1000 years after Christianity began, but he was a hugely influential theologian. He was a Christian, but he also strongly respected Aristotle’s view of natural law. Plato and Aristotle lived in a society that embraced same sex relationships, but Christianity did not. Aquinas fused many of Aristotle’s views with Saint Paul’s views to arrive at his own argument for natural law. It upheld the Christian view that sex outside of marriage, including homosexuality, was unnatural, and therefore wrong, but he brought in Aristotle’s philosophical framework of natural law, with essence in forms, to back up why homosexuality is unnatural. For Christianity, it’s unnatural if god says it’s unnatural, but by using Aristotle’s essences, he can also argue that it violates the natural essence of the form.
A man and a woman are opposites by nature. The man is superior in almost every way, a woman inferior. Nature dictates that a man would never want to put himself into a “female” position. Blah, blah, blah. You know the arguments. The point is, by drawing from Aristotle, Aquinas was able to bolster his Christian position on morality, because each system is a natural law ontology.
You said: What is discouraging is that I still see so many people displaying an infinitely more tolerant attitude towards ciggerettes (smoke breaks for instance) than they will about a substance that is illegal and it is those people that position themselves as tiresome obstacles to a better, more ethical, approach to government.
Well, the debate over legalization of drugs and banning cigarettes, at least in public places, has been going on for years. I’m wondering, what alternative do you suggest?
It seems to me that laws must exist for the safety and well-being of society. A society without order is anarchy. By subjecting yourself to the laws of your country you do give up some personal freedom, but you also gain a lot of benefit and other freedoms. Those laws are not absolute though. In a democratic society, laws can be changed. If you want to see particular laws change, you can join movements to change them. It often takes years, but often it pays off.
Take homosexuality for example. I was a kid in the 80’s when gays stayed in the closet unless they wanted to become a punch line, or a headline. It was perfectly acceptable to make homophobic slurs in public, and the most sympathy you’d get was from people who pitied you for having a horrible mental illness.
There are still people who see it this way, but fewer and fewer do, and as these older generations die out and more people continue to fight for gay rights, it will continue to change. Gays, lesbians, and allies have spent decades fighting like hell for their rights, but it’s working. In a society of rigid absolutes, your hands would be tied. Change would be a futile endeavor.
If you’re passionate about legalizing drugs, get involved in promoting that change. Become an activist. But keep in mind that others are just entitled to their beliefs as you, and in a democratic society they have as much right to fight against you. And as a side note, I will mention that I think the US government offers us such a bastardized sham of democracy. But in theory, can you come up with a better system?
Nad
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sabastious
Beauty, for example, exists in an absolute sense, a Form. Beauty is real. It’s here whether you’re here to observe it or not. What you experience as beauty is an abstraction. How closely your concept of beauty relates to the true Form of beauty determines whether or not your perception is correct, but ultimately it’s something you cannot know entirely.
Couldn't a case be made that beauty, and as other Forms, is only a definition that didn't exist before the definers came to be?
-Sab
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sabastious
Not wanting tomake a chicken or the egg argument, but morals first and then ethics.
It seems that, based on our discussion, that morals and ethics require each other within their perpsective definitions. It could be said then that both came to be at the same time, correct?
The amount of data is paramount. In the beginning there was little data for humans because of perceptual limitations. At our point in time we have more data than one person can even work with which changes everything doesn't it?
Ethics may have been second to morals at first with limited human perception, but now ethics seem more useful than standalone morals, am I right?
Take the moral of cleanliness both body and mind. Cleanliness is defined by the moral and definitions are created by human observation also which changes over time. The ethics of cleanliness will continue to be refined as morals are created and tossed out the window.
So, with all data taken into account, is it morally upright to ingest Monosodium Glutamate? From where I stand ethics can take care of that question whereas our contemporary moral conclusions only provide a convoluted or overty simplicstic solution.
-Sab
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Naddia_the_Godless
Sab said: Couldn't a case be made that beauty, and as other Forms, is only a definition that didn't exist before the definers came to be?
Yes! Protagoras provided a counter argument to Plato's objectivist view that the Universe is the reality, or that reality is unaffacted by human influence. For him, man (humans) is the measure of all things. Our perceptions are our reality. How do we know what lies beyond them?
Modern philosophy parted ways with strong objectivist views like Plato's centuries ago with Descartes and Kant, and metaphysics is often relegated to arguments among theologians. Most modern philosophers either take a softer objectivist view (materialism, empiricism) or a softer relativist view (phenomenology, existentialism). Strong objectivist positions like Natural Law have mostly gone the way of the dinosaur, in the world of philosophy, that is. It's still very much present in religion. Strong relativist positions like Berkeley's Idealism and pure subjectivism are used largely to challenge objectivist claims, but can't stand on their own either.
Nad
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sabastious
Protagoras provided a counter argument to Plato's objectivist view that the Universe is the reality, or that reality is unaffacted by human influence. For him, man (humans) is the measure of all things. Our perceptions are our reality. How do we know what lies beyond them?
This is how I think. Man's perception is, for all intents and purposes, reality until proven otherwise. The only way it can be proven otherwise is to commune with a true alien intelligence. Until such communion can be proven with a human, non-hypothetical, perspective reality IS what we percieve.
Which actually would make the statements "There is a God' and "There is no God" both true because all human conclusions, that are evidenced, must be considered true to the individuals that actually believe them, correct?
-Sab
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Naddia_the_Godless
Sab said: Which actually would make the staements "There is a God' and "There is no God" bothtrue because all human conclusions that are evidenced must be considered true to the individuals that actually believe them, correct?
Yes, from the perspective of subjectivism this would be true, but I think this position is problematic. First of all, to state that human perception is reality is an affirmative claim. How do you know that individual perception is reality? This is an epistemological question. What is reality? How do you know that the physical universe isn’t the reality, and that we are merely spectators within it?
Protagoras is credited with introducing the concept of subjectivism as a philosophical position. Many centuries later, Rene’ Descartes developed a system of skepticism, which he applied to the physical world. I don’t recall his exact process, but it went something like this: How do I know that this table is real? Maybe I’m imagining it. How do I know that Mathematics exists? Maybe a demon is tricking me. Surely my body is real. Or am I dreaming?
I doubt. Doubt is always there. He could think of other possibilities for the physical, but not for his mind. His thoughts were always there. And hence his famous phrase: I think; therefore I am. He existed because his mind existed, and that’s all he could know.
George Berkeley took this skepticism about the physical world even further. I see an object in front of me. What is it? It’s long, hard, and rectangular. We call it a table, but what is a table? Strip down what we think we know and deal with what we perceive. How could it be described? Hard, brown, firm, smooth. What we perceive is sense data. Colors, sounds, tastes, smells, textures. We put these together in our minds to create a concept that we call a “table.” And we assign it a function. It’s a “table” and not a “desk” because we put food on it at dinner time instead of a computer. But function is cultural. Have you ever seen Little Mermaid, where Ariel finds a bent fork from the human world and thinks it’s a comb for her hair? The only things we know are what we perceive, and what we perceive is sense data. This is known as Idealism, and it’s a strong relativist position.
As I mentioned in the last post, it’s a very good argument to challenge objectivist claims, but it has its own problems. Just because this is our first experience, it doesn’t follow that it is reality, at least in any absolute sense. Also, if it’s true that each person’s experiences and beliefs are just as true as the next, then there is no consistency in reality. If your perceptions lead you to believe that there is no god and another person’s views lead them to believe that there is a god, then there both is a god and isn’t a god in reality. That’s contradictory, and it’s illogical.
Idealism led to a branch of philosophy known as phenomenology. Phenomenology deals with phenomena, not with absolute reality. It goes something like this: We each have minds and subjective experiences that prevent us from connecting with ultimate reality, whatever that may be, but our minds are also structured in such a way that we can connect with objects outside our minds through sense data. Phenomenology throws out the whole concept of ultimate reality because it’s something that lies beyond our ability to know, so it’s irrelevant. Instead, it brings a relative reality down to an experiential level.
Yes you have your mind, your thoughts, your sense, your perceptions, but you did not acquire them alone. You only become who you are by interacting with and in relation to objects outside of your mind. Take an infant, hypothetically, and imagine it born without sight, hearing, smell, or taste. It is kept alive, but never held or nurtured. Would that infant ever be capable of the conversation we’re having?
We think in terms of language, a skill that most humans possess, but it’s not a priori knowledge. It’s experienced. It’s learned. We learn what “hard,” “soft,” “brown,” “sweet” mean through interactions with outside objects, including parents. The self exists first, but who we become and how we think about things, our perceptions, are strongly influenced by our experiences. This led Martin Heidegger to flip Descartes on his head with his phrase: I am; therefore, I think.
In phenomenology, the dialectic between mind and object creates the reality. Reality, therefore, is both subject to experience and determines experience. This is a relativist position, but it’s more defensible than subjectivism because it takes any claims of an absolute nature out of the equation, and brings them all down into the realm of human experience.
This view allows for some objectivity as well. Science, for example, is a method that many people can use to establish ideas about how our perceivable world works. It never gets us to reality (or if it does we can’t know that it does), but it helps us make sense of shared perceptions.
According to this view, if you ask: Is each person’s belief or nonbelief in a god true? It depends on how you’re defining truth. If both are attempting to use an objective method like science, no, they can’t both be right. That violates the laws of logic. However, logic, reason, and science are all subject to the experiential dialectic, as are subjective experience and personal revelation. So if a person claims to believe in a god because they have personally experienced god, how could anyone claim otherwise? It’s not that both are true in an absolute sense, but they may be experientially. If I look down and see spiders crawling all over my body, and you at me like I’m crazy. There are no spiders. Which of us is right? My experience is as valid as yours. But that’s all it means. Maybe there are spiders; maybe there are not. Nobody can escape their experiential existence to get to a place of meta logic to make good their claims to the contrary.
So from that standpoint, I would say that a person who claims to believe in god, as long as they don’t try to prove it with science, could be right. Although it’s also possible they could be wrong, if they later believe they misinterpreted certain experiences that caused them to believe in a god, and now they no longer do. But in any instance, "god" too is subject to human experience.
Nad
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sabastious
How do you know that the physical universe isn’t the reality, and that we are merely spectators within it?
Because we cannot travel anywhere in the physical universe, but merely magnify what we see which is actually light that has been traveling for billions of light years. Until I actually know what is there NOW I have no reason to factor it into any firm conclusions.
-Sab
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sabastious
Protagoras is credited with introducing the concept of subjectivism as a philosophical position. Many centuries later, Rene’ Descartes developed a system of skepticism, which he applied to the physical world. I don’t recall his exact process, but it went something like this: How do I know that this table is real? Maybe I’m imagining it. How do I know that Mathematics exists? Maybe a demon is tricking me. Surely my body is real. Or am I dreaming?
You can only know something is real if it is constant across all known scanarios. Take how water drains for instance in relation to the hemispheres. Without space travel we can prove how the earth is positioned in space: on an axis.
We can predict exactly how gravity works in all known scanarios. That is reality. Does it mean that gravity only works the way we think it does? Not a valid question because not enough data is there to support any conclusion like that.
Of course the creation of the computer program changed our perspective. As movies like the Matrix toy with, reality may be a system, similar to a computer program, and that is why constants exist because they are part of a systematic program.
-Sab
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sabastious
As I mentioned in the last post, it’s a very good argument to challenge objectivist claims, but it has its own problems. Just because this is our first experience, it doesn’t follow that it is reality, at least in any absolute sense. Also, if it’s true that each person’s experiences and beliefs are just as true as the next, then there is no consistency in reality. If your perceptions lead you to believe that there is no god and another person’s views lead them to believe that there is a god, then there both is a god and isn’t a god in reality. That’s contradictory, and it’s illogical.
They are contradictory and illogical until more data brings in the missing pieces to the puzzle making it logical, which of course may never happen. Many things are only illogical temporarily, but not to minimize the term. Illogic is illogic and must remain so until proven otherwise.
-Sab