Simon Paynton

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Are you attempting to get an ought from an is?

You can get an ought from an is, if one of the is’s is a desire or goal.  In the absence of desires, goals, passions, values, etc., it’s not possible (according to David Hume, and I agree with him).

Here’s an example of groups that do immoral things, while being moral within themselves:  the Pirate Code.

Unseen wrote:
I can recognise nagging problems, I just haven’t mentioned any.

Gee, I wonder why(?). OK, give us some examples of issues in your theory yet to be explained.

I can’t think of any.  I’m sure there are some.

Value theory isn’t about standards or measures or, if so, only obliquely. The “value” in this case has more to do with what one…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Telling us how we make moral choices doesn’t tell us where morality comes from.

It’s the other way round – telling us where morality comes from tells us how we make moral choices.

You are doing description, not philosophy, and your descriptions are reductionist (you don’t recognize any nagging problems, there’s no area yet to be ex…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
And yet, that often happens. Look at the January 6 conspirators, the Manhattan Project, and The Beatles. Prosecutors take advantage of this sort of thing in building cases all the time.

Then, they’re being competitive with each other and not moral.

So, but you are not engaging in moral philosophy, which would be telling us what…

[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

Once the Romans had decided to achieve their goals at the expense of others – you still wouldn’t expect them all to turn into thieves and liars towards each other, and start fighting like rats in a sack.

Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

It’s possible to follow moral rules while doing immoral things.

Unseen wrote:
By that definition, if I were to find myself the last person on Earth and thus not a member of any community or group of any sort, could I even have a morality? Or can someone live by a code of their own without reference to anything other than himself?

By that definition, you would require instrumental rather than moral…[Read more]

unapologetic wrote:
Do you think they started from the selfish behaviors of microbes and became cooperation out of necessity?

I would say your intuitions are pretty spot on.

Normativity is the pressure to achieve goals.  Morality comes in two parts: instrumental normativity, and joint or moral normativity.  The second is the joint version of t…[Read more]

I’ve been studying evolutionary ethics for about 13 years.  I’ve found that morality is both simpler and more complicated than people think.

Morality is the self-regulation within a cooperative unit or group.  So, I govern myself; you govern me; I govern you; we govern each other and ourselves on behalf of the group, in the directionof the j…[Read more]

If only he wasn’t so overwhelmingly self-centred to the point of stupidity.

Unseen wrote:
Increasing the producton of vegetable-based foods has environmental problems of its own, since it has a negative effect in terms of reducing habitat for natural animals and plants whereas cattle, for example, can share habitat with the plants and animals that live on the land on which they graze.

But it’s many times more efficient…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Cattle and other animal crops serve a valid purpose. Every creature on Earth is food for something else.

They serve a purpose (food) but they’re also suffocating the Earth, with their greenhouse gases and environmental degradation.

unapologetic wrote:
I apologize for not remembering the source.

Was it Michael Tomasello and the Leipzig Institute for comparative primatology?

Yes, we’re W.E.I.R.D.

I don’t know a lot about the Chinese, but as I understand it, they used to have Taoism and Confucianism, and these have been co-opted by the state as ways to run a mass population and get everyone behaving prosocially.  Also, the state monitors people’s behaviour to make sure they are behaving in prosocial and state-approved ways.  So, that’s w…[Read more]

I need to spend a lot of time on my own doing not much, so I can think about my philosophical studies.  I don’t read novels any more, which I used to enjoy before I started that.  But even if I wasn’t doing that, I would still choose to spend most of my time on my own.

@unapologetic – you need to find out how to turn off and on the block quotes.

It sounds like you’re what they call an introvert.

unapologetic wrote:
Did anyone suggest a word to replace ‘spiritual’?

I don’t use the word, because I don’t need to.  The only “spiritual” thing I do is meditating.  I consider this to be a spiritual practice, as it is widely called, because it’s to do with self-cultivation and purification – trying to remove the bad or counter-productive parts…[Read more]