Eodnhoj7 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 6:07 pm
Charm wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:56 pm
Kant was a great guy; but reasoning your way to morality is a lost cause.. No moral act is rational... Injustice (general immorality) is always justified.. Morality is valid whether one lives of dies.. Since the object of all reason is life, and a better life for the reasoner, no line of reason is valid or reasonable which results in the death of the reasoner... This is not true of morality which takes no account of our material and physical existence, and only cares for our common and spiritual existence.. If I jump into a river to save the life of a stranger the action cannot be rationally justified, but then, it does not have to be.. What is reasonable too, is seldom moral.. I think what philosophers miss in regard to morals is that reason can be found after the fact to justify moral behavior, but no individual can reason himself to death... People die all the time for their morality, and it is because they find dying easier than living with their immorality.. Morality does not grow out of what we think, but out of who we are, and who we are is far older than our mastery of reason.. Morality is pre- rational ... All babies are moral.. All children raised in love are moral, and in this regard the seeds of reason in the moral life grow into the tree of death.. I don't want to over state my case.. If people were not mostly moral everything would fall apart quickly.. The great advance of people like Baudelaire, Freud, and Nietzsche was to bury the age of reason.. People are not reasonable, and yet unreasonable is still a terrible insult... Primarily, people are reasonable in pursuit of unreasonable goals.. It is like flying.. Once it was impossible, and the desire to fly is irrational, and yet reason across many branches of science and technology make flight possible.. It is still an irrational desire..
All morality is a means of being through which we give structure to our actions, and hence ourselves, through our ability to apply or eliminate boundaries at the intellectual, emotional or physical level.
This structuring of the self and the environment through the self, by this application of limits in turn results in the structure inherent within all being.
In simpler, more common terms, the golden rule is an act of creating, maintaining, or destroy the fabric of being through the limits which form it.
People are reasonable whether they intend it to be that way or not..."I do "x" because "y" feels good" is still an act of reasoning...however base it may be.
I was trying hard to grasp the ways in which people structure their relationships, and politically involved, I was talking to a democrat on a democrat form, and I was hammering away on the key board, and my wife, now ex found the word I was looking for: FORM... This is an ancient word in philosophy, is still widely used, and has appeared quite correctly used in our Declaration of Independence.. In addition, we have the words Morph, and morpheme as cognate words.. No word I know of better expresses what you are trying to say.. As my wife asked: Are you in some form of relationship with that person.. Absolutely, technically yes.. We have these forms, these social forms as a way of taking sides, but we also have physical form related to all that can be conceived of with numbers, which is another form, and one Pythagoras thought more real than reality.. While people form conceptions of reality, they tend to believe their conceptions are more real than the reality conceived.. As Schopenhauer said: The world is my idea.. Forms is a better method of explaining what you mean as you explanation is entirely too complicated to make sense without an explanation.. So; Forms are a structure, and every form is a form of relationship.. When a form is no longer useful to the understanding of reality, people no longer relate through it.. There may have been few who actually related through the form we think of as the Ptolemaic universe, but some did... Regardless, we use forms not only to conceive of the world and reality with concepts and ideas, but also to conceive of spiritual notions that cannot be conceived of in any true sense at all.. One good example of a form is marriage.. Marriage is a relationship built around a spiritual notion called love... As all forms of relationship, it has a purpose, and a cause; and it is recognized as a form of relationship socially and legally.. As with all forms of relationship, we can look at the relationship through the form, but also look at the form through the relationship... Because what Jefferson said is true, that it is not for light and transient causes that we replace our forms... You simply do not find healthy relationships in rotten forms, or find relevant forms in around failed relationships.. A good form supports a healthy relationship.. It is impossible to conceive of humanity without forms even if you are mostly informal as I am.. And we are entering a revolutionary time when our old forms must be trashed and replaced by new and vibrant forms.. It is because we so seldom change our national social forms that this seem strange or impossible.. Looking at history as a whole, we see this happens all of the time even if such changes may take hundreds of years to come about..
So; as an aside, I would suggest you refer to your structures as form because it will give you a better and more elegant method of conceiving of morals, and all other issues.. As a moral exercise, read the preamble of the constitution.. There is stated the goods they hoped to achieve, but did not.. But this agrees with Aristotle that governments are created with the object of good.. My point is, that what you see it the spiritual motivation for setting up a social form, so the form was not born whole as an abstraction.. First the spiritual good is conceived of as a form, and then the social form to achieve that good was created.. What for example is the spiritual good for which law as a social form is created??? Justice is the good, and law is the form by which that good is supposed to be achieved.. All forms have a purpose.. At a minimum they involve two people who must both gain from the relationship.. Any way, something to consider..