iambiguous wrote:From Henry Staten's, Nietzsche's Voice:
Our moral beliefs did not fall from heaven and neither are there credentials we can flash like a badge to establish our moral probity. Consider all the rest of human history, including most of the planet at the present moment. What are we to say about this overwhelming spectacle of cruelity, stupidity and suffering? What stance is there for us to adopt with respect to history, what judgment can we pass on it?...Christianity attempted to recuperate the suffering of history by projecting a devine plan that assigns it a reason in the here and now and a recompense later, but liberalism is too humane to endorse this explanation. There is no explanation, only the brute fact. But the brute fact we are left with is even harder to stomach than the old explanation. So left liberalism packages it in a new narrative, a moral narrative according to which all those lives gound up in the machinery of history are assigned an intelligble role as victums of oppression and injustice...Only very recently is it possible for someone like Schutte [Ofelia Schutte, who in her book Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche Without Masks castigates Nietzsche for his authoritarianism.] to write as she does, with so much confidence that the valuations she assumes will be received as a matter of course by an academic audience, just as much as a Christian homilist writing for an audience of the pious. And only within the protective enclosure of this community of belief can there be any satisfaction in the performance of this speech act, any sense that anything worthwhile has been accomplished by this recitation. When this moral community by means of this recitation reassures itself of its belief, it comes aglow as the repository of the meaning of history, as the locus that one may occupy in order to view history and pass judgment on it without merely despairing and covering one's eyes and ears. There may not be any plan behind history, nor any way to make up their losses to the dead, but we can draw an invisible line of rectitude through history and in this way take power over it. Against the awesome 'Thus it was' of history we set an overawing majesty of 'Thus it ought to have been'.
But our liberalism is something that sprang up yesterday and could be gone tomorrow. The day before yesterday the Founding Fathers kept black slaves. What little sliver of light is this we occupy that despite its contingency, the fraility of its existence, enables us to illuminate all the past and perhaps the future as well? For we want to say that even though our community of belief may cease to exist, this would not effect the validity of those beliefs. The line of rectitude would still traverse history.
This is more or less the way it is, right? Every day we are confronted with each new numbing rendition of the Human Condition: cruelity, stupidity and suffering. And out in the world are all of these hundreds and hundreds of "moral communities" trying to make sense of it all...trying to put it all in perspective...trying to rationalize it all away in Meaning...in God...in Ideolgy...in Truth. In The Way. Theirs. That they all hopelessly conflict and contradict each other does not mean many, many additional refrains won't be joining the chorus of "rectitude" in the years to come. Long after we are all gone.
I like the honesty of Staten's words above. I like the way he refuses to pretend human interaction can be portrayed [realistically] in any other way. It is, after all, something we are not supposed to dwell on. This: that there is no more or less authentic way in which to live. There is only history unfolding in all of its brute naked facticity. A cauldron of cacaphonous contingency. It simply is. And each of us, one by one, will die and then for eternity it will be as though we had never been born at all.
Unless, of course, Staten's "line of rectitude" above is merely one more self-delusion. But then how in the world would we go about determining that? How would we even begin to do this when we have no real way of figuring out the legitimacy of our own line?
Perhaps, when all is said and done, Schopenhauer wasn't pessimistic enough.
Dan~ wrote:Pain, stupidity and death are common, but that doesn't give them merit.
Free thinkers and skeptics throughout history have entertained the suspicion that morality is a mistake, a scam, a fiction that we make up; but few others have welcomed this idea with open minds. Recent discussions of the topic can be traced to the work of the philosopher John Mackie, who defended his ‘moral error theory’ by criticizing a widely held understanding of morality called ‘moral realism,’ the belief that morality is something ‘real’ that we discover, not something we have made up. Mackie called his own view ‘moral skepticism,’ but he was unskeptical enough to open his 1977 book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong with the ‘dogmatic’ assertion that “there are no objective values.” Just as atheists claim that the beliefs of theists about the objective existence of a god are in error, moral error theorists claim that the beliefs of moral realists about the objective existence of moral rules, prohibitions, virtues, vices, values, rights, and duties are also in error, and for the same reason – what they are talking about doesn’t exist.
I think this line of argument would mean I have to become a pothead if applied elsewhere.Pneumatic-Coma wrote:I just wanted to ask those who believe abortion to be immorally bad.
How many children have you adopted?
I meant in the context of legalization of marijuana debates. We can certainly try to find out if anti-abortionists do this or that, but it still leaves open the issues around abortion. Some of them likely have adopted children. So, we still have to do the real, tough work of figuring out the issue itself, rather than hoping that ad hom based arguments will save us the bother.Pneumatic-Coma wrote:No. Just here on this forum of topic.
Pneumatic-Coma wrote:I just wanted to ask those who believe abortion to be immorally bad.
How many children have you adopted?
With no god to make the rules, consistent atheists will already have abandoned religious morality, which means that they are left with a choice between some kind of secular morality and a moral error theory. An atheist’s eventual embrace of a moral error theory will be facilitated, if not forced, by the ease with which arguments used to undermine theism can be recycled to criticize the analogous beliefs of secular moralists.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:A nihilist can complain about food, it's a taste thing. So with morals.
Zero_Sum wrote:Karpel Tunnel wrote:A nihilist can complain about food, it's a taste thing. So with morals.
Yet if nothing is wrong his preferences are no better than others or vice versa, everything is relative and fluid.
Karpel Tunnel wrote:Zero_Sum wrote:Karpel Tunnel wrote:A nihilist can complain about food, it's a taste thing. So with morals.
Yet if nothing is wrong his preferences are no better than others or vice versa, everything is relative and fluid.
Sure, but he can complain. A nihilist cannot on moral grounds complain about finding a used diaper in his pizza. But given human preferences in general, he could complain, saying the management is fucked up and will lose his or her and likely other business. Nihilists are not restrained from complaining, nor is it hypocritical. My God, remember yourself in your nihilist days: complain, complain.
The new you complains via a mask. This is what the return of morals has done in your case.
Zero_Sum wrote: If there is no wrong there is nothing wrong in creating morality concerning values where none had existed before and since as you say morality is nothing more than an enforcement of ideals by those with political or economic power then by your definition there is nothing wrong with that either.
Zero_Sum wrote: So, all in all there is nothing wrong with morality or anything and your complaints becomes erroneous. One then begins to wonder what nihilists are complaining about......
iambiguous wrote:Zero_Sum wrote: If there is no wrong there is nothing wrong in creating morality concerning values where none had existed before and since as you say morality is nothing more than an enforcement of ideals by those with political or economic power then by your definition there is nothing wrong with that either.
Bingo!
But my contention here is that "right" and "wrong" behaviors either revolve around some essential truth and/or transcending font [which most call God] or around any number of hopelessly conflicting existential contraptions rooted historically, culturally and experientially in a No God world.
Then I explore [or seek to explore] the actual existential parameters of those who do "create morality where none existed before".
In other words, in any given context, why one set of prescriptions/proscriptions and not another? And how is this related to the manner in which I construe "I" here as basically an existential contraption rooted in dasein?
Indeed, how are your own values not the embodiment of this?Zero_Sum wrote: So, all in all there is nothing wrong with morality or anything and your complaints becomes erroneous. One then begins to wonder what nihilists are complaining about......
Again and again and again: What on earth do you mean by this?
What particular morality out in what particular context out in one particular world construed from what particular point of view?
It is ludicrous to speak of morality as "wrong". Why? Because whenever men and women choose to congregate into one or another village, community, state or nation, there must be "rules of behavior" that either reward or punish certain behaviors.
And all this particular nihilist complains about are those who insist that only those behaviors sanctioned by "one of us" get rewarded.
And then the extent to which this revolves more around might makes right, right makes might or moderation, negotiation and compromise.
But even here I point out over and again that this particular "intellectual" assessment is but one more existential contraption that here and now "I" happen to subscribe to "in my head".
In no way shape or form would I ever suggest that I can demonstrate that all rational men and women are obligated to subscribe to it as well.
Zero_Sum wrote:If there is no wrong there is nothing wrong in creating morality concerning values where none had existed before and since as you say morality is nothing more than an enforcement of ideals by those with political or economic power then by your definition there is nothing wrong with that either.
So, all in all there is nothing wrong with morality or anything and your complaints becomes erroneous. One then begins to wonder what nihilists are complaining about......
What sense does that make???And all this particular nihilist complains about are those who insist that only those behaviors sanctioned by "one of us" get rewarded.
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