RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 2:09 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 2:56 am
RCSaunders wrote: ↑Mon Jul 06, 2020 1:54 am
First of all, I have no opinion about what you call morality and do not recognize whatever it is you are calling, "morality of ends."
Yes, you do.
Think what you want, but there's no point telling you what I believe if, when I do, you are going to deny it. Why would I lie about it?
I didn't accuse you of lying...just not being consistent with the logic of your own claims. If there are no ways of judging ends, you can't complain about things like people indoctrinating children...it's not wrong, then. It's just another "end" they can want. Your only criticism would be on their lack of doing it the fastest way.
There can be no higher objective or purpose than an individual's own life and existence.
If this is true, then somebody who is an indoctrinator is already conforming to the "highest objective" you know...advancing his own "individual life and existence," and cannot be critiqued beyond that.
I do not call identifying the relationship between actions and consequences "moral judgement."
I wouldn't either. I would call it little more than cause-effect reasoning. But it doesn't help us with claims like "indoctrinating children is wrong."
Of course I identify things like rape, assault, and murder as wrong acts (but not for the reason you do) and regard pedophilia, and all other paraphilias psychological defects, and genocide a symptom of a grossly defective value system. I do not "judge" them as, "immoral," a useless judgment that disguises the true evil of such things. They are not bad because they violate someones, "moral sensibilities," or their notion of, "the moral good." They are bad because of the harm that results to individual human beings because of them.
Then you're appealing to a higher principle than "individual life and existence." For the rapist, pedophile, thief or murderer certainly have their own interests well in hand; so you must be claiming it's universally wrong for them to harm others...but from where do you get this "higher" principle, since you don't believe in God, and you have sworn you do not judge ends?
They're winning...on their own terms...doing what they want, and doing it "faster," to use your word. Why
shouldn't they, if what you say is true?
I don't, "judge," ends.
There it is again.
And yet you shortly say,
Only an idiot would say, "a human being can pick any ends at all," as if there were no consequences to which ends he pursued, as though he could pursue a life of waste and self destruction or a life of production and self-preservation and they would have the same consequence. Duh!
So now you've got an additional problem. If the deed in question does not create "self destruction" and achieves the "ends pursued," then you have no criticism for it. So successful pedophiles, rapists and thieves are just fine?
I don't think you think that. But your theory allows for it. If you only judge the quality of
means, then
ends can be anything...
anything at all.
The kind of life human nature requires and makes possible is a life of rationally directed action to produce and achieve everything one's life requires by one's own effort.
Human nature also "makes possible" a life of war, predatory behaviour, exploitation, tyranny, cruelty and barbarism. All these have been done before, in abundance. And as for any other life, in what sense does human nature "require" anything?
It looks to me like you're anthropomorphizing "human nature" into a substitute divine being, a deistic "Human Nature" that has design, directions, plans and purposes.
...a life that is less than fully human that ultimately cannot satisfy and leads to one's own regret, despair, and self-destruction.
Well, I don't detect any of these things in Weinstein, Epstein, Prince Andrew, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Robert Mugabe, Jimmy Saville, the rioters of recent days, the rich Saudi funders of terrorism, and any number of other evil people who now live or have lived. It seems to me they had little conscience, no evident regret, were delighting in their evil rather than despairing of it, and in most cases, did not destroy themselves...in fact, would be quite happy to be doing what they did all along today, and would do it again.
Their lives were as "human" as anybody else's, were they not? They weren't Martians, after all. So what, in your theory, makes their "human nature" different from anybody else's? Human beings are clearly not only capable of what we traditionally call "good," but also of outrageous evil. And some of them seem to get away with it, instead of inheriting those ills you list as if they were inevitable results of the life such people have chosen...
That's plainly not true -- not in
human terms, anyway.