Re: Announcing a new science - its name is ETHICS
Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2017 8:55 pm
Greetings, Londoner
You write: "The trouble is that these notions are all circular. Who is a 'considerate, empathic human being'? Answer: Those with moral health."
I never said that nor wrote that. You are answering your own question and in the process committing The Straw Man Fallacy.
If someone, in any culture on the planet that you might visit, shows you consideration, then you may truthfully refer to him or her as "considerate," and I as an observer would agree with your judgment - about the event at time t.
You ask: "Are you saying that whatever a society thinks is moral, is moral? "
No, I am not saying that. ...What I am saying is that - like the Supreme Court said about pornography - if someone is kind and respectful to you, defers to you, gives you attention, and shows you consideration ...YOU KNOW IT. You recognize it when you experience it. You don't even need the confirmation by your peers that this is so.
The problem, representative of the moral chaos we find in the world today, is that you have to ask, as you did, "Who are my neighbors?"
The members who comprise the human species, the Family of Man, of humankind, are your neighbors!
{And for Professor Peter Singer, and many others, who have evolved to a higher stage of moral growth and development, mammalia are neighbors also.}
You write: " You need to assert why that particular meaning is right and the other meanings are wrong."
Why that particular meaning is right is to be found in the book, LIVING SUCCESSFULLY: how the new science of Ethics will benefit you. This link may prove helpful:
https://www.amazon.com/LIVING-SUCCESSFU ... 0644914&sr
Robert S. Hartman wrote an entire book examining and analyzing attempts by philosophers to define "good," and showed how they were inadequate. Yet they pointed in a certain direction, namely toward The Axiom of Value [a synthetic a priori, that is, partly conceptual and partly empirical.] That Axiom is the eventual definition of "x is a good C" which he discovered.
It turns out that "good" is a secondary quality, not a primary one; it is a descriptor of descriptors; it is a value-quantifier - analogous to a logical-quantifier.
It is a second-order adjective. See the book by Hartman, The Knowledge of Good. Here is a link: - http://www.brill.com/products/book/knowledge-good
To illustrate: If I say to you "Meet me by my car in that (vast) parking lot." You say: "Describe it." I reply: "It's a good car." You won't know where to find it. If I say, though, "It's a late-model yellow car" then you may meet me there. What's the difference in the two descriptions? "Late-model yellow" are primary properties; while "good" is a secondary property - a property of properties. When I call the car "good" I mean it is what a car is supposed to be, i.e., it runs. When I step on the brake, it brakes; when I step on the accelerator pedal it accelerates.
To someone else a "good car" might mean that it has many more properties, but the car is "good" if it's 'all there' as a car, if it actually has all those features. So "good" is a quantifier of qualities.
Happy reading
Questions? Comments? Reviews?
You write: "The trouble is that these notions are all circular. Who is a 'considerate, empathic human being'? Answer: Those with moral health."
I never said that nor wrote that. You are answering your own question and in the process committing The Straw Man Fallacy.
If someone, in any culture on the planet that you might visit, shows you consideration, then you may truthfully refer to him or her as "considerate," and I as an observer would agree with your judgment - about the event at time t.
You ask: "Are you saying that whatever a society thinks is moral, is moral? "
No, I am not saying that. ...What I am saying is that - like the Supreme Court said about pornography - if someone is kind and respectful to you, defers to you, gives you attention, and shows you consideration ...YOU KNOW IT. You recognize it when you experience it. You don't even need the confirmation by your peers that this is so.
The problem, representative of the moral chaos we find in the world today, is that you have to ask, as you did, "Who are my neighbors?"
The members who comprise the human species, the Family of Man, of humankind, are your neighbors!
{And for Professor Peter Singer, and many others, who have evolved to a higher stage of moral growth and development, mammalia are neighbors also.}
You write: " You need to assert why that particular meaning is right and the other meanings are wrong."
Why that particular meaning is right is to be found in the book, LIVING SUCCESSFULLY: how the new science of Ethics will benefit you. This link may prove helpful:
https://www.amazon.com/LIVING-SUCCESSFU ... 0644914&sr
Robert S. Hartman wrote an entire book examining and analyzing attempts by philosophers to define "good," and showed how they were inadequate. Yet they pointed in a certain direction, namely toward The Axiom of Value [a synthetic a priori, that is, partly conceptual and partly empirical.] That Axiom is the eventual definition of "x is a good C" which he discovered.
It turns out that "good" is a secondary quality, not a primary one; it is a descriptor of descriptors; it is a value-quantifier - analogous to a logical-quantifier.
It is a second-order adjective. See the book by Hartman, The Knowledge of Good. Here is a link: - http://www.brill.com/products/book/knowledge-good
To illustrate: If I say to you "Meet me by my car in that (vast) parking lot." You say: "Describe it." I reply: "It's a good car." You won't know where to find it. If I say, though, "It's a late-model yellow car" then you may meet me there. What's the difference in the two descriptions? "Late-model yellow" are primary properties; while "good" is a secondary property - a property of properties. When I call the car "good" I mean it is what a car is supposed to be, i.e., it runs. When I step on the brake, it brakes; when I step on the accelerator pedal it accelerates.
To someone else a "good car" might mean that it has many more properties, but the car is "good" if it's 'all there' as a car, if it actually has all those features. So "good" is a quantifier of qualities.
Happy reading
Questions? Comments? Reviews?