Which morals could be considered universal and applicable? - Page 7 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15131145
Wellsy wrote:It is impossible to understand the individual outside the context of projects and communities which they're part of.


That's an absurd claim. I would say you can't fully understand the individual without understanding the social context but to claim there is nothing of the indiviual to understand outside the social context is absurd on its face. You're essentially denying the human faculties of reason and conscience which self-evidently do extend well beyond the social context.


If you don't have faculties that extend beyond social context then you're not even a person let alone an individual so I would say it's impossible to understand the individual purely in terms of social context.
#15131148
Sivad wrote:That's an absurd claim. I would say you can't fully understand the individual without understanding the social context but to claim there is nothing of the indiviual to understand outside the social context is absurd on its face. You're essentially denying the human faculties of reason and conscience which self-evidently do extend well beyond the social context.


If you don't have faculties that extend beyond social context then you're not even a person let alone an individual so I would say it's impossible to understand the individual purely in terms of social context.

Could you specify further what you mean about things like reason and conscience extending beyond social context. Do you mean things going beyond the immediate context?
Like this: https://internationalfriendsofilyenkov.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/artinian-2017-radical-currents-in-soviet-philosophy-vyyggy-ilyenkov.pdf
The condition of human freedom begins at the moment of deliberate detachment from the most immediately concrete and literal in everyday life. To be free means to engage in that which is contingent and aleatoric, to break away from the rhythms of the routine, the well-formed, and that which is expected. This freedom from a “concrete situation” is enabled by “thinking in (through) concepts” (2015: 100). I
...
In sum, Vygotsky understood freedom as a condition made possible by the practice of abstract thought,

I'm thinking you mean something else than this though.

But to elaborate on my position, I see people as acting out of reason rather than causality as conceived within natural science.
http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/nr/08_89.pdf
So the concept of human action is central to our enquiry. What is it to understand any given piece of behaviour as a human action? Consider the following example. If my head nods, it may be a sign of assent to a question or it may be a nervous tick. To explain the nod as a way of saying ' Yes' to a question is to give it a role in the context of human action. To explain the nod as a nervous tick is to assert that the nod was not an action but something that happened to me. To understand the nod as a nervous tick we turn to the neurophysiologist for a causal explanation. To understand it as a sign of assent is to move in a different direction. It is to ask for a statement of the purpose that my saying ' Yes' served; it is to ask for reasons, not for causes and it is to ask for reasons which point | to a recognisable want or need served by my action. This reference to purpose is important. When social anthropologists come across some unintelligible mode of behaviour, obedience to a primitive taboo, for example, they look for some as yet unnoticed purpose, some want or need to which such obedience ministers; and if they find none they look for some past want or need which the practice once served, even though now it is nothing but a useless survival. That is to say, we make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like. Where we cannot do this, we treat the unintelligible piece of behaviour as a symptom, a survival or superstition.

Those who view people as acting other wise tend to view people narrowly as objects of manipulation.
This also comes from a compatibility view of free will as not self-determining through the mediation of our actions via objects and signs (https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htm).
And I subscribe to a line of thinking within Cultural Historical Activity Theory in which individuals are the only things which act, but they don't act strictly as individuals as their actions are situated within larger projects or contexts which have an intention distinct from the purpose of their actions.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Article_on_Teleology.pdf
To understand how a social practice, made up of millions of individual actions, can be ‘self-conscious’ entails the distinction Hegel makes between the general and the universal. In general, not all the individual actions in a social practice are motivated by the exact same purpose or intention, not every action implies exactly the same object.

For example, the aim of a capitalist firm is to expand its capital, but to do so it pursues various subsidiary aims (services) and provides wages to its employees. Thus there will be a variety of concepts of what, say, James Hardy Ltd., is aiming at, but an analysis will show that it is neither the provision of building material nor the welfare of its employees, but the accumulation of capital which is its aim, its intention. (Hegel distinguishes between ‘purposes’ such as asbestos production or wage-earning) and ‘intentions’ which provides the motivation for the diverse purposes (Hegel 1821, §§ 114-128).

So, a ‘collective subject’ is not a group of people but a social practice. An entire community is seen then as an aggregate of social practices. A social practices is an aggregate of purposive actions, united by their sharing of a common intention or motivation.

It's a bit like the difference between the purpose of me mailing in a ballot vote by placing the letter in the mailbox isn't motivated by simply putting a letter in a mailbox but the wider social contact which realizes my vote through the postal and electoral system which transports it and registers my vote for candidates. The intention was to vote although the purpose of that particular act was to mail a letter.

And to further exemplify this sense of individual actions are meaningless outside of the broader social relations which give intention to a series of individual actions, I quite like the summary MacIntyre gives in how without broader context, an action can be incomprehensible and thus not understand by itself.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub
Macintyre explains narrative this way. Imagine that a woman approaches you at a bus stop and says, "The name of the common wild duck is histrionicus histrion.icus histrion.icus." Now, what would you make of this person? Truth is, you can't make anything of her, or of her action, without more information. Her act is completely unintelligible. But now suppose it becomes known that this woman is a libraria , and she has mistaken you for the person who earlier had asked for the Latin name of the common wild duck. We can now understand her action because it has been put into a context. The contexts that make sense out of human action are stories or narratives. To explain an action is simply to provide the story that gives the act its context. We can imagine any number of stories that might make sense out of the bus stop incident (for example, perhaps she is a Russian spy whose password is the sentence in question). But we will also say that the explanation of her action is rendered more fully if we can tell the story that takes her longer- and longest-term intentions into account and shows how her shorter-term intentions relate to the longer-term ones. So we might discover that she has rushed out of the library in search of a particular patron because she has been put on a standard of performance under threat of losing her job. Her longer-term intention is to save her job. Her longest-term intention might be uncovered in telling the story of how she is the sole provider for her paraplegic son. Macintyre reasons that if human actions are intelligible only with respect to stories that contextualize intentions, then that which unifies actions into sequences and sequences into a continuous whole is the story of one's life. My life as a whole makes sense when my story is told.


So if your point was about things beyond the immediate situation, then I guess I didn't exemplify how broad the social context was conceived in my post. And even when dealing with the faculties, whilst they have a primitive and biological form, they become socialized in the thinking of Vygotsky, mediated by signs. Consciousness derives from social experiences. Action is both physical and objective behavior and the subjective motivating force behind it. The content of the mind is senseless when people simply try to prescribe it to the physical processes of the brain but no one yet in examining the brain in itself and attempting to resort to vague notions of emergent complexity through evolution have been able to properly posit how consciousness is introduced into a healthy functioning brain. Because much of the content of consciousness isn't inherent to the biology of the brain although such a material basis is a prerequisite for human consciousness. That's because, following the earlier quote from Ilyenkov, it is the individual's place within the whole of society that largely influences what constitutes their consciousness.
#15151588
Well everything is a matter of perspective in this world, it always has been this way. Soemthing may seem moral to you but a immoral to another person and both of you would be right because that's your own reality .

The only universal moral in my humble peasant opinion, that no matter what is the basis of a normal human, is the respect to life.
You can steal, you can cheat, you can mutate genetically anything you want.
But life, is the most sacred. A human that can't respect life, is a human with no boundaries and not a human at all in the end.

Of course that's just my opinion because ei believe every form of life is a whole new different world. Maybe I'm just being too Christian or something I don't know. But that's what I believe, life above all.
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