Irish Marriage Equality Referendum Draws Near

[Ben Kenobi]

My beef is with your dishonesty and/or ignorance.

In citing stats you don't like? Why don't you show me what you believe a honest Ben Kenobi would say.

[Ben Kenobi]

Naw, they're essentially the same thing since we live in a causal universe.

Uh, no they are not. You might want to start listening to the people who know something about philosophy.

Value ethics have ends (even if it's just to maintain their virtue) that they view as important to achieve

Virtue ethics believes that a person has a value independent of their actions. Utilitarianism believes that it's only through actions that people have worth and value. IE, that doing bad things makes you a bad person, whereas virtue ethics argues that people have an essential nature. Utilitarianism assumes that if you stop doing the bad things that you become a good person, Virtue ethics argues differently. Most argue that there's an essential nature that doesn't change.

Consequentialists have virtues (those traits which align with actions that will lead to the desired consequences) even if they don't want to admit they are virtues.

Uh, Consequentialists believe that the ends justify the means. What virtue is that?

[Aeson]

In citing stats you don't like? Why don't you show me what you believe a honest Ben Kenobi would say.

I dont know what an honest BK would say, since we have no example to go off of.

As for the "stats"... that claim is just another example of your dishonesty, since our conversation being referenced here was about the meaning of "be with" and so had nothing to do with any stats.

[grumbler]

Uh, no they are not. You might want to start listening to the people who know something about philosophy.

This is good advice. Too bad you don't take your own advice.

Virtue ethics believes that a person has a value independent of their actions. Utilitarianism believes that it's only through actions that people have worth and value. IE, that doing bad things makes you a bad person, whereas virtue ethics argues that people have an essential nature. Utilitarianism assumes that if you stop doing the bad things that you become a good person, Virtue ethics argues differently. Most argue that there's an essential nature that doesn't change.

This is pretty much completely wrong. Virtue ethics does focus on the nature of the actor rather than the action (i.e. proposes that the same action may be immoral for one actor and moral for another - god allowed the child to die, but, since god is moral, it must be moral for him to allow children to die, even if that's not moral for us), but utilitarianism is just one of many consequentialist moral concepts, and consequentialism is focused entirely on the action and not the actor (an act is morally correct if it produced a morally superior outcome). Deontology also focuses on the act, but proposes that the moral value of the act derives from the act, rather than from the consequences of that act (an act is morally right or wrong no matter the consequences). I don't know of any modern adult that believes in virtue ethics except in religious terms.

Uh, Consequentialists believe that the ends justify the means. What virtue is that?

Consequentialists believe that the morality of an action is determined by the morality of its outcome. The virtue is the measure of the outcome.

Don't just read wikipedia. Read Michael Sandal's http://www.amazon.com/Justice-Whats-.../dp/0374532508 and watch the video series starting here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY Then you won't make these kinds of mistakes in describing various approaches to morality.

[giblets]

No. They are two completely distinct branches of ethics. One says things are bad because they have bad consequences, the other that things are bad because they turn you into the sort of person who does bad things.

Explains why Ben is so determined to prove that homosexuals do bad things more than heterosexuals do.

[C0ckney]

I mean, what you're proposing, if I read you right, is that basically people used to be utter dumbasses who treated the phrase "God wants" as something equivalent to "Simon says." Generally when this argument is made, it's backed up by the assumption that People Back Then were like that because they knew less science, or had less stuff, or were all diseased peasants whacking the mud with sticks like in Monty Python's Holy Grail. I think the reality is more that people in the Western world thought about morality in a radically different way. And perhaps not only in the Western world; cf. Theravada Buddhism, Daoism, possibly even some aspects of Confucianism. Only recently did God stop being the name we gave to the end goal of our existence and start being, in effect, the finger-shaking judge enforcing rules for the sake of good social order. The Traffic Cop in the Sky. Of course everybody laughs at that.

no that's not what i mean. i agree that people thought about morality in a different way in the past, the economic, social and political contexts were totally different and this clearly demanded a different morality. a good example of this might be the attitude to usury, which went from beyond the pale, to acceptable in limited circumstances, to accepted as a normal fact of life. funnily enough this transition mirrored the economic circumstances surrounding it.

i'm not sure we'll find much agreement about the good life. suffice to say that i find the earlier socratic dialogues, which confine the search for the virtue and the 'good' (an idea that i have problems with, but that's another thread), to the human realm, far more convincing than the hazy later dialogues, which seek to unify human affairs to the order of the universe.

but in any case, and how did people think about such matters in olden times? by working it out for themselves (but how many people really thought about such things - not many, much like today, would be my guess), by learning moral lessons from their parents/relatives, from folktales, from bible stories as interpreted by their priests. so their christian morality and views were not taken from source, but rather filtered through a certain class of men and their own social and cultural experience; and this was the case until a few hundred years ago. this is not so different to how consider such matters are considered today. it's just that the folktales have been modified, the priests have changed and crucially, the economic, social and cultural circumstances have been transformed.

there is of course a lot more information out there now; one can find a summary of just about every major philosophical idea at the touch of button, and this does make a difference to the way we think, but probably not as much as we believe it does. one of the mistakes that philosophers and people who like to talk about philosophy make is to imagine that the world is animated by ideas, when it fact it's animated by people who are animated by ideas and the real circumstances of their lives.

i hadn't read any hawthorne until a few years when i picked up a collection of his short stories. i enjoyed them.

[Elok]

I'm not a big fan of Hawthorne, but The Celestial Railroad is awesome. It's a revisit to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where modern belief systems have replaced his arduous metaphysical journey with a quick and easy train trip. So they cross the Slough of Despond by chucking self-help books and positive thinking literature into it to make a bridge, etc. I've never read PP (too Protestant to interest me), but TCR was still pretty funny to me.

[Elok]

Also, apologies for misunderstanding you. For the record, I do believe that people were in fact utter dumbasses back then--but no more so than now. I get impatient with the notion that we're much cleverer now, when the vast majority of human beings appear to make their decisions based on tenuous hearsay and whackadoo rumors.

I am somewhat worried about/depressed by the abandonment of the entire concept of civic virtue; in America, at least, we still have it in a very weak form, in that many of us make idols of the military, but that's not really healthy. Most of the kids I teach learn no moral philosophy beyond the utterly namby-pamby (blather about self-esteem that even their teachers don't appear to really believe in). If they have any convictions about anything, it's "don't judge, ever," which sounds superficially good but really amounts to a disbelief in all collective values. When I held a debate, one of my kids expressed concern that even attempting to argue one's POV is a kind of aggression against others' beliefs. Makes me wonder if we're raising a population of contented crypto-nihilists, each happily growing up in his own little bubble of self-constructed reality.

[C0ckney]

that's perfectly fine. i expect it was my fault for not being clear, or not putting my ideas well enough.

i think you're right about civic virtue, although of course i would argue that the military and the nation are the very opposite of civil virtue, being built upon myths that are wholly unconnected to the spaces where we live our lives, but we've talked at length about that before. i suppose it's partly a consequence of our globalised and interconnected world. even 30 years ago, if i had wanted to have a political discussion i would have needed to go to a meeting, or some local places where such things were discussed, at the most i could have written a letter to the editor. now i can talk instantly to people from all over the world about all kinds of subjects, and this is great, it exposes me to different perspectives and different ideas, but at the same time i lose something, i lose out in participating in something that is far more relevant to my real life (yes i am feeling guilty about missing the residents' association meeting on thursday). however, i think it's more to do with the fact that we are told constantly that we are special individuals and only our individual selves matter, and in tandem that any sort of collective activity prevents us from being ourselves, rather than being the conduit through which our individuality is expressed. we are atomised in our workplaces and our communities; it's hardly surprising that we don't see them in civic or collective terms any more. it depresses me too.

as for whether the lack of moral philosophy is something that is exclusive to or more common among the young, i wonder. your situation is obviously different, but here in brazil i see that people my age and older are no less superficial in their morality than the younger generation; they're all expediency with a thin glaze of marxism and/or christianity. i'm also not sure whether having strong views on everything is necessarily better than 'don't judge', especially where those views are based on morally weak or absent foundations; but perhaps that's just me saying that it's bad to have strong views that i disagree with.

[kentonio]

i think you're right about civic virtue, although of course i would argue that the military and the nation are the very opposite of civil virtue, being built upon myths that are wholly unconnected to the spaces where we live our lives, but we've talked at length about that before. i suppose it's partly a consequence of our globalised and interconnected world.

I think the problem is that we're still trying to make sense of a basically complete new world using old and outdated value and belief systems. None of them really fit the way the world works now, and the problem is that we don't have one yet that really does. It feels like people are basically stumbling around in the dark reaching out for something that actually makes sense in terms of the way we live our lives now.

[grumbler]

Also, apologies for misunderstanding you. For the record, I do believe that people were in fact utter dumbasses back then--but no more so than now. I get impatient with the notion that we're much cleverer now, when the vast majority of human beings appear to make their decisions based on tenuous hearsay and whackadoo rumors.

I am somewhat worried about/depressed by the abandonment of the entire concept of civic virtue; in America, at least, we still have it in a very weak form, in that many of us make idols of the military, but that's not really healthy. Most of the kids I teach learn no moral philosophy beyond the utterly namby-pamby (blather about self-esteem that even their teachers don't appear to really believe in). If they have any convictions about anything, it's "don't judge, ever," which sounds superficially good but really amounts to a disbelief in all collective values. When I held a debate, one of my kids expressed concern that even attempting to argue one's POV is a kind of aggression against others' beliefs. Makes me wonder if we're raising a population of contented crypto-nihilists, each happily growing up in his own little bubble of self-constructed reality.

Man, it must suck to have students ;like yours. Luckily, my students (high school and college) aren't like that at all; they are avid to learn about different concepts of morality, and are not as passive and accepting as yours.

Maybe you want to consider teaching someplace else. I, personally, wouldn't consider staying in a teaching position where my students were as ****ty and ill-prepared as yours.

[grumbler]

I think the problem is that we're still trying to make sense of a basically complete new world using old and outdated value and belief systems. None of them really fit the way the world works now, and the problem is that we don't have one yet that really does. It feels like people are basically stumbling around in the dark reaching out for something that actually makes sense in terms of the way we live our lives now.

There is something to what you say, but I'd argue that humans have never had, nor ever will have, a set of value and belief systems that fit the way their contemporary world works/worked. Values and beliefs are always a product of socialization, and socialization always lags social development. I think that the best that we can do is teach people how to think about morality and moral reasoning, so that they can develop moral reasoning skills that allow them to go beyond received wisdom and can deal with moral dilemmas as they arise in the real world.

It is hard. Moral dilemmas are uncomfortable, and people generally prefer to think that they don't exist, and that the old ways of thinking solve moral problems without the dilemma ever arising. That's why religious people are always moving the moral goalposts.

[C0ckney]

I think the problem is that we're still trying to make sense of a basically complete new world using old and outdated value and belief systems. None of them really fit the way the world works now, and the problem is that we don't have one yet that really does. It feels like people are basically stumbling around in the dark reaching out for something that actually makes sense in terms of the way we live our lives now.

i think this has always been the case though. people's thoughts and ideas, or perhaps better their range of thoughts and ideas, are largely formed by the society around them and that society is in a constant state of transformation and renewal. we might say that the world is changing more quickly, but at the same time we have more mechanisms in place that allow us to understand and cope with that change. of course there can be sudden developments that throw up entirely new questions; the debates about cloning could be an example of this. but very often these kind of questions have been amply discussed well before the technology that allows them to be posed for real is developed. this wide diffusion of ideas is one mechanism that allows us to cope with a rapidly changing world.

[kentonio]

Values and beliefs are always a product of socialization, and socialization always lags social development.

people's thoughts and ideas, or perhaps better their range of thoughts and ideas, are largely formed by the society around them and that society is in a constant state of transformation and renewal.

I don't think this is particularly correct. The pace of social change for extremely long periods of history was extremely slow and measured in many multiples of generations. Our society today is basically unrecognizable from the one our parents grew up in, let alone our grandparents. I don't think its any kind of exaggeration to say that there has been literally no time in history that is even close to comparable.

[Elok]

Man, it must suck to have students ;like yours. Luckily, my students (high school and college) aren't like that at all; they are avid to learn about different concepts of morality, and are not as passive and accepting as yours.

Maybe you want to consider teaching someplace else. I, personally, wouldn't consider staying in a teaching position where my students were as ****ty and ill-prepared as yours.

Dude, they're kids. Middle and high schoolers. The bulk of their character is the result of parenting, education and genetics; they've barely reached the age where they can reason independently. If they are ill-prepared, the fault lies in their upbringing and teaching, far more than in themselves. The girl who was worried about being mean in debate presumptively got the idea from her parents and the broader culture, where such notions are endemic. In the debate itself, she performed admirably for a seventh-grader. Most of the class did, if it comes to that, with the exception of a couple of attention-starved boys. They just inherited an unusually pissant set of beliefs, which I hope they will shake off in time.

I'm actually a substitute teacher at present (which means my perceptions of the zeitgeist are based on a very broad but shallow sampling). Getting ready to dive in to being a real teacher in another state. It'll be rough, but hopefully worth all the bureaucratic bull****.