Which morals could be considered universal and applicable? - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#13816285
While it is true that morality varies greatly from culture to culture, there should at least be ONE
universal moral virtue: Respect for Human Life.

It is certainly sad to see that not all cultures embrace this as a universal code, to some this right is
restricted to protecting those of their own specific culture or religion, to others the age of the person
(as in abortion) makes all the difference. This is not a thread about abortion, but the way I see it:
If you cannot scientifically prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that life does not begin at conception,
then life must be protected from this point on, or you risk killing an innocent human being.

Do I favor the death penalty? Yes! Why? Because I believe in the sanctity of life of course. In short,
if someone kills then he/she renounces his/her own right to live. Simple. The respect for human life
must begin before a crime is committed and murder is to be punished (yes, punished) harshly.

Before you claim that I would kill off just anyone, let me make it clear that the death penalty should
be very limited to cases where the cruelty of the perpetrator is obvious and reserved to cases of first
degree murder or worse. Did Gaddafi, UBL and Hussein deserve to die? Yes, they did not respect
Human Life.
#13816292
The ClockworkRat wrote:I'd be interested to hear why, if what I intuit that is is correct.


The argument is from the other side. That is, if we do not reject other intuitions which we think are rationally held (our metaphysical intuitions about the external world or other minds), then why do we think there are sufficient reasons to deny very plausible intuitions about moral claims? This is also compatible with Ingliz's view (which I do not necessarily endorse) that we have no access to moral facts. We have no access to metaphysical facts either, but we do not think this is sufficient grounds to deny the objective existence of the external world (and the objective existence of the external world is not subject to proof, it must be assumed if we can prove anything empirical at all). By not subjecting moral intuitions to the same, loose conditions we use for accepting metaphysical intuitions we are not being all too rational or consistent (and we tend to accept metaphysical intuitions only because they lie at the foundations of empirical science). So, to sum up, there are no more reasons to deny moral intuitions than there are to deny metaphysical intuitions. We accept the latter, so we should accept the former unless there is overriding concerns/information. Whatever has been offered to override our moral intuitions, I have argued, are not really claims against the objectivity of moral claims, but only about the objectivity of moral superstructures that arise from those basic moral claims and, of course, the objectivity of meta-ethics. It may still be the case, however, that we have objective moral superstructures and meta-ethics (or that there are objective ones and we simply do not know them yet). These, however, cannot be grounded in intuition (since we have no intuitions about them).

Ingliz's insistence that I need to show that intuition is reliable is a misunderstanding of my argument. The way out of my argument is complete skepticism (but that's the way out of pretty much any argument).
#13816304
Vera Politica, now I really am interested in going into some philosophy with you. I think I will enjoy it a lot.

Morality is intuitive? What is intuition anyway? Where does it exist in our brains? Can you pinpoint it?

The yoga practicing 'reincarnationists' in India think intuition resides in the 'third eye' that part of our brain that lies between our eyebrows. If you close your eyes and breathe deeply and empty your head of any thoughts (which is hard to do) you can still your mind and perceive your intuition. Do you think they are right? Or is it all mumbo jumbo to you?
#13816309
Hi Tainari,

Wiki provides a preaty neat, concise description:

wiki wrote:Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without inference or the use of reason.[1] "The word 'intuition' comes from the Latin word 'intueri', which is often roughly translated as meaning 'to look inside'’ or 'to contemplate'."[2] Intuition provides us with beliefs that we cannot necessarily justify. For this reason, it has been the subject of study in psychology, as well as a topic of interest in the supernatural. The "right brain" is popularly associated with intuitive processes such as aesthetic abilities.[3][4][5] Some scientists have contended that intuition is associated with innovation in scientific discovery.[6] Intuition is also a common subject of New Age writings.[7]


The bolded part is key here.

Although our brains are certainly what allows us to intuit (I do not think intuition is something non-cognitive so it has some empirical basis), this does not mean that it can be identified with any physical part or location of the brain. It is probably associated with the same mechanisms that allow for abductive reasoning or others forms of non-computational reasoning. I may be wrong about this however. Intuitions are the subject not just of psychology but, more recently, of experimental philosophy (although some think experimental philosophy just is psychology).

The yoga practicing 'reincarnationists' in India think intuition resides in the 'third eye' that part of our brain that lies between our eyebrows. If you close your eyes and breathe deeply and empty your head of any thoughts (which is hard to do) you can still your mind and perceive your intuition. Do you think they are right? Or is it all mumbo jumbo to you?


I do not think they are right. I think that, by what I could tell from the post only, it is mostly mumbo jumbo.
#13816332
We accept the latter, so we should accept the former

The appearance of an objective existence to an external world is not necessarily the objective existence of the external world. By subjecting moral intuitions to the same, loose conditions we use for accepting metaphysical intuitions we are being rational and consistent if we treat them both as useful fictions. We can "save the appearances", by putting forward mathematical relationships which correspond to observation, without making any attempt to suggest a physical explanation for the relationships.

Vera Politica wrote:Indeed we can treat them as useful fictions
Last edited by ingliz on 21 Oct 2011 23:52, edited 3 times in total.
#13816374
Ingliz wrote:The appearance of an objective existence to an external world is not necessarily the objective existence of the external world. By subjecting moral intuitions to the same, loose conditions we use for accepting metaphysical intuitions we are being rational and consistent if we treat them both as useful fictions. We can "save the appearances", by putting forward mathematical relationships which correspond to observation, without making any attempt to suggest a physical explanation for the relationships.


If all you do is save the appearances, you still lose the existence of external minds. Very little is needed to save the appearances -- much less than the multitude of 'fictitious' entities within the sciences and philosophy.

I know you like quoting Ingliz, but do not quote me out of context. I am not agreeing with you.

CWR wrote:I must have phrased my question poorly, VP. I was interested in why you "don't endorse a computational theory of mind"; presuming that such a theory is what I think it is.


Well, this is quite complex but generally the idea is that abductive reasoning (reasoning to the best explanation) is not computationally tractable. Since abductive reasoning occurs all the time, at least a significant portion of the mind (the portion responsible for the kind of thinking we're interested in) cannot be computational. Now, I would like to emphasize that this has to do with tractability -- unlike the philosopher Jerry Fodor I do not think we have an apriori objection to the computational mind.

The idea of a computational theory of mind is the "massive modularity thesis" which is the view that the mind is entirely composed of discrete, informationally encapsulated modules that process input (sense data) into output. Each cannot share information with the other, but certain modules can take outputs as inputs. The problem is that abductive reasoning is this sort of global reasoning where the mind takes information from anywhere it wants and reasons globally. This part of the mind cannot be explained computationally. Minds are not like computers.
#13816425
I think I understood what VP said well. Do you want me to have a go at the explanation Clockwork? Or should VP attempt to put it into something that is less abstract for you? Let me know. Because what Vera Politica stated is fascinating.
#13816427
Maybe think of it like this:

The computational mind is the mind that is made up of tiny Turing-style micro-processors. Each processor takes in a certain type of input, computes, and spits out an output. Some micro-processes take in sense-data input (but only certain types: like you may have one micro-processor just for processing the color red, another for the color blue, etc. They are very specific) others take in the outputs of other processors - so we get this model where we have micro-processors on the periphery taking in sense data, and then more and more micro-processors in the center, processing the output from the 'periphery of the mind' and spitting out its own output. This combinations of micro-processors is supposed to generate thought. The problem is that when we can "reason abductively" (reason to the best explanation) we can actually use any information to do so. My professor would call this "Fodor's chewy-chocolate centre of the mind" where a sort of non-computational glob could just reason globally -- accessing any input/outputs of any micro-processor (we actually call them 'modules'). A computational module could not do this, since the inputs it could take are very specific. Thus, we have a sort of non-computational centre of the mind where reasoning occurs -- and which, Fodor thinks, we aren't even slightly close to understanding.

I hope this helped somewhat.

Tainari, try to explain it as well, the more angles one looks at something, the better the chances of understanding it.
#13816432
Vera Politica, you just gave me a piece of a puzzle I had been working on for years...and it was elusive until that post. Now, I have a grasp on it. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

There is a reason why computers lack something human minds have in abundance. Computers need to be programmed and the programming needs to fit certain parameters and specifications in order to make sense of the information it is receiving. Human beings can receive information that might not make any sense to them initially or it could be stored in a part of the brain that can later integrate it and link it to new information.

The five senses feed into our brains and our brains actually store all of our experiences and information in different areas of the brain according to the function it serves. But we are humans with a link to the outside world in our brains. The two are related to each other and feed off each other. Therefore, the intuition is there letting us know something is valid even though we don't have all the specifics to understand it yet.

At least that is how I understand it. VP that is very very interesting to me Senor. I hope you explain that fully. It is the unknown part of humanity that remains untapped. The 2% difference between us and the chimps I have been trying to figure out....completely. You just helped me with that enormously.

:)
#13816441
Tainari88 wrote:Vera Politica, you just gave me a piece of a puzzle I had been working on for years...and it was elusive until that post. Now, I have a grasp on it. THANK YOU SO MUCH!!

There is a reason why computers lack something human minds have in abundance. Computers need to be programmed and the programming needs to fit certain parameters and specifications in order to make sense of the information it is receiving. Human beings can receive information that might not make any sense to them initially or it could be stored in a part of the brain that can later integrate it and link it to new information.

The five senses feed into our brains and our brains actually store all of our experiences and information in different areas of the brain according to the function it serves. But we are humans with a link to the outside world in our brains. The two are related to each other and feed off each other. Therefore, the intuition is there letting us know something is valid even though we don't have all the specifics to understand it yet.

At least that is how I understand it. VP that is very very interesting to me Senor. I hope you explain that fully. It is the unknown part of humanity that remains untapped. The 2% difference between us and the chimps I have been trying to figure out....completely. You just helped me with that enormously.

:)


Yes, and it is not just that the mind can access stored information, but any information at any given time. You can imagine the mind's processors firing away, but the central, non-computational unit can access any particular subsets of current outputs by these micro-processors and, like you said, stored information as well. It can reason GLOBALLY not computationally.

Jerry Fodor put it best: When we can't program a robot to make my toast without the fear that it will set the house on fire, we know for sure that we don't understand the human mind.
#13816457
Okay, I think I've got you now. It's not like you're arguing against neuroscientific research in favour of mind-body dualism or something ridiculous like that. :roll:

:D

I was talking to my psych professor a couple of weeks back, and he reckoned that cognitive models of the mind, such as the one you describe, are likely to have vanished within the decade.
#13816523
I am not agreeing with you.

You can agree that knowledge of a rational, consistent, intuitive theory that explains how the world appears to work is not necessarily the same thing as knowing how the world works?
#13816852
Human senses require central processing. Because our senses are not the same (some have bad hearing - some have better eyesight), our central processing is different and unique to each individual - personality.

We are no different in individuality and uniqueness as any other mammal.


CounterChaos sits in the corner and reads poetry - out loud.
#13817084
'fictitious' entities

If we are "nothing more than a collection of electric charges embedded in a universal energetic electromagnetic field", then the chair you are sitting on possesses only an illusory solidity, it only appears to be solid.
#13862764
Suska wrote:It was considered moral at the time to be a Nazi - it was immoral to avoid service. Post-war we think of such absolute service as dangerous. You can't just say "I was just following orders" anymore.

The Nazis seem a lot more moral than you're average middle of the road westerner today. Most Nazis seem genuinely concerned about the allegation that they murdered 6 million Jews, they often seek to deny it. The Nazis at least had the excuse that they believed the Jews to be an existential threat. When America and her allies were accused of murdering 800,000 Iraqis including half a million children through the sanctions against Iraq, nobody was interested. How could the trivia of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of culturally and racially different people compare to American's need for cheap gas. I recently discovered I'd been under a misapprehension about Milgram's authority experiment. People don't tend to do things because they fear authority, when ordered to inflict the electric shocks greater numbers refused. People do things because they think they are right and people accept authorities judgements as to what is right.
Suska wrote:I think the Holocaust highlights the universal nature of morality. Even in that very pressured environment the extermination of the Jews was an extraordinarily kept secret.

I think the reaction to the Holocaust highlights the Europe wide racism and hypocrisy and the class, cultural prejudice of the opinion formers. of course everyone bleeds on about Anne Frank because she was a nice, educated, White Middle Class girl. Who ever gave a fuck about the Gypsy holocaust? Someone mildly criticises Israel and they're accused of Anti Semitism, but you can slag down Gypsies to your hearts content. no one would lose any sleep if they suffered another holocaust. In the decades prior to the Nazis, Europeans committed the most terrible atrocities, South West Africa and the Congo immediately spring to mind. But oh those evil racist Nazis fancy treating those nice White people like African sub humans. :roll:
#15131090
I like this entry point on considering ethics as not just between individuals, but ones within set social relations which dictate their ethical commitments to one another. It is impossible to understand the individual outside the context of projects and communities which they're part of.
And the social context and projects have a social objectivity which is beyond anyone individuals beliefs, as they have a basis in real world relations, and habits.

https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub
In Macintyre's construction, virtues are those qualities that assist one in the extension of his or her story, and, by extrapolation, the extension of the story of his or her community or communities. The question, "What ought I to do?" is not a question of one's political duty as it was in Aristotle's day, but it is a question whose answer must be preceded by the logically prior question: "Of which stories am I a part?”


https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Collaborative%20Ethics.pdf
Human freedom can only be attained through mediated self-determination, i.e., participation in projects. A stranger encountered in a public space is to be treated, Kant tells us, as an end in themself, that is, as a project. My relationship to a stranger then is that between two mutually independent ends, or projects. At the same time however, the other is a person, and not just any aggregate of actions, and persons are bearers of ineliminable rights. But the interaction between two individuals is never unmediated, except in the jungle perhaps, the question is always to discern which project defines the relationship relevant to a specific ethical problem.

The foregoing review of efforts to devise an ethics appropriate to life in modern, secular nation states, needs to be taken together with my proposal that these efforts can only reach a successful outcome by taking a collaborative project as mediating the relationships between individuals. This leads us to a two-step approach to resolving ethical problems. First we must identify the relevant project and the position of the subjects within that project, or alternatively determine that the subjects must in the given instance be regarded as independent projects. Then we must identify the ethical norms indigenous to the given project(s), which we will do on the basis of a typology of
8

projects and relations between projects. For each paradigm there are specific ethical norms. Every project has its own ethics, according to its self-concept; however, not in every case can such norms be endorsed as rational and reasonable, and it will be the ethics shaping the paradigmatic norms of collaboration that will conclude this examination.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phi
It is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the armative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the first question
108a affirmatively and the second negatively.In other words, it is only individuals who act, have intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm
In Hegelian philosophy, however, the problem was stated in a fundamentally different way. The social organism (the “culture” of the given people) is by no means an abstraction expressing the “sameness” that may be discovered in the mentality of every individual, an “abstract” inherent in each individual, the “transcendentally psychological” pattern of individual life activity. The historically built up and developing forms of the “universal spirit” (“the spirit of the people”, the “objective spirit”), although still understood by Hegel as certain stable patterns within whose framework the mental activity of every individual proceeds, are none the less regarded by him not as formal abstractions, not as abstractly universal “attributes” inherent in every individual, taken separately. Hegel (following Rousseau with his distinction between the “general will” and the “universal will”) fully takes into account the obvious fact that in the diverse collisions of differently orientated “individual wills” certain results are born and crystallised which were never contained in any of them separately, and that because of this social consciousness as an “entity” is certainly not built up, as of bricks, from the “sameness” to be found in each of its “parts” (individual selves, individual consciousnesses). And this is where we are shown the path to an understanding of the fact that all the patterns which Kant defined as “transcendentally inborn” forms of operation of the individual mentality, as a priori “internal mechanisms” inherent in every mentality, are actually forms of the self-consciousness of social man assimilated from without by the individual (originally they opposed him as “external” patterns of the movement of culture independent of his will and consciousness), social man being understood as the historically developing “aggregate of all social relations”.

It is these forms of the organisation of social (collectively realised) human life activity that exist before, outside and completely independently of the individual mentality, in one way or another materially established in language, in ritually legitimised customs and rights and, further, as “the organisation of a state” with all its material attributes and organs for the protection of the traditional forms of life that stand in opposition to the individual (the physical body of the individual with his brain, liver, heart, hands and other organs) as an entity organised “in itself and for itself”, as something ideal within which all individual things acquire a different meaning and play a different role from that which they had played “as themselves”, that is, outside this entity. For this reason the “ideal” definition of any thing, or the definition of any thing as a “disappearing” moment in the movement of the “ideal world”, coincides in Hegel with the role and meaning of this thing in social human culture, in the context of socially organised human life activity, and not in the individual consciousness, which is here regarded as something derived from the “universal spirit”.
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