From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 16 2003 - 22:00:15 GMT
Hiya Matt,
>Johnny,
>
>Johnny said:
>It's like saying we shouldn't respect such-and-such because we don't like
>some aspects of it. If you accept morality AS respect, then, don't you
>need to respect respect itself for it to have any meaning? It's like you
>need to value value for value to have any meaning.
>
>Matt:
>Sure. You have to respect respect and value value. But these terms only
>denote the narrow sense of "good stuff" not the wide sense of "good stuff
>and bad stuff". Another way of putting it is that I respect respect so
>much that I would hate to belittle it by respecting murder.
I agree that there is good stuff and bad stuff, and no one respects bad
stuff. Murder isn't as strong a pattern as not-murdering,and so respect
would go to not murdering. But even so I think that murder needs to be
respected, not in a "that was a good thing" type of way, but in a "that's a
significant thing , and it often happens when x and y and z factor in
together". So that's why we should avoid factors x and y and z getting
together, because it tends to cause murder. So on the whole, we have to
respect that Morality causes murder in some rare circumstances, and not just
expect people to avoid it in those circumstances. We have to care about
circumstances. (And I would rather have a world with murder than a world of
such oppression that no one could murder anyone.)
>Matt said:
>But as far as the debate, I take James' stance: there isn't a difference
>between the two that makes a difference. If we somehow figured out that
>the whole world was deterministic, would that change any of the choices in
>our own lives? No.
>
>Johnny said:
>You don;t think so? I think it would change our choices ito realize how
>contingent and co-related all our choices are. We'd put more care into
>them, and we'd also have a different attitude toward the choices of others.
> People today think they don't affect other people because everyone has
>free will, but they are wrong, what we do affects other people, we alter
>their wills.
>
>Matt:
>Whoa, you are in left field here.
It's nice and sunny here, come join me.
>The debate you want to get into looks nothing like the debate usually
>explored in philosophy classes. In that case, when I say "deterministic"
>it doesn't mean "contingent". Because I think the realization of
>contingency, as you might have been able to tell, is a good thing.
me too, and yes, i have been able to tell.
>Typically the term "determinism," when run into in classes called things
>like "Freedom, Fate, and Choice," implies that we don't need to put care
>into our actions because they've already been determined.
Yes, and this is such a silly objection. Do people really think that great
minds such as Augustine and Luther and Edwards and Schopenhauer never
noticed that they could put care into their actions, or that life was better
when they made careful choices and put effort into things? The question has
never been if the man is free, only if the will is free.
>You may want to change the terms of the debate, put a different spin on the
>terms to change the way we think about them, but I would say that you've
>spun them so hard that you've landed far outside the debate.
I'd say the debate has spun itself away from what used to be well
understood.
>Which, I would say, is great because, as I said, I think the debate, using
>the terms they've used for the last several hundered years, pretty
>pointless.
I agree, since Schop and Edwards, the debate has been empty of sensible
figures.
>
>Matt said:
>Meaning doesn't disappear with free will and neither does morality.
>
>Johnny said:
>Well, free will implies an arbitrary will, a random will, and a will that
>is independent of morality - or else I don't understand how a free will
>makes any decisions. I'd say morality does disappear with free will.
>
>Matt:
>First, you misread me. I was saying that if free will _disappears_, then
>meaning doesn't disappear. I said that because of the typical terms of
>debate and the way things are typically infered in the debate. Second, you
>are, again, out in left field as far as the debate is concerned, which I
>say is a pretty good thing.
Oh, I see. Right, a concept of free will is not at all necesarry for
morality or meaning. I say a concept of free will destroys these thing, or
is destroyed by these things.
>From the three things you've said, I'd say your truck shouldn't be with the
>free will debate, which anyone involved would say you've missed completely
>(again, its a good thing), but with debates over tradition. You want to
>emphasize the importance of tradition and how radical revolutions or
>overturnings of tradition aren't necessarily good (well, I think you might
>say inherently bad). I have sympathy with this. I'm with Oakeshott,
>Gadamer, Rorty, and MacIntyre on the importance of tradition and how the
>idea of breaking radically with tradition leads to two things: 1) in
>philosophy it leads to the idea of ahistoricality, and 2) in politics it
>leads to the idea that only a bloody revolution will save us. Number 1, I
>never have a truck with. Number 2 is something that sometimes is necessay,
>but certainly not in all contexts. When 1 and 2 are put together, such as
>in Marxism, they can lead to particularly disasterous results: the idea
>that the only thing that will _ever_ save us is a bloody revolution.
>
>Matt
Again, I'm glad to see Rorty et al are in agreement about the importance of
tradition. I think the free will debate is bound up in the ahistorical
debate. People who think they have free will deny connection to history to
their actions, or the future's connection to their actions today..
Johnny
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