Simon Paynton

Surely the cell can exist as some kind of bubble.  You can have proto-cells.

Once reproduction starts, there must be some kind of ratchet effect that leads to ever-greater fitness and adaptation.

michael17 wrote:
happenstance can design and control a system

But an organism has to be adapted to its environment, or it can’t do well, and will be selected against by natural selection.

Those cells that are best at surviving and reproducing in an environment will become the dominant paradigm.  Reproduction of any kind is the key innovation,…[Read more]

michael17 wrote:
As an engineer, when I see efficiency in design with economy in both the mechanics and the computer control system, this is a engineering marvel which does not occur true happenstance.

Surely natural selection selects for behaviour and traits that are most adapted for the organism’s or molecule’s thriving, surviving and…[Read more]

Davis wrote:
little (if any) philosophical use

Moral principles are ideal forms or concepts.  Each one consists of a particular ideal pattern of behaviour within various situations.

Davis wrote:
Sounds like someone skimmed the wikipedia article.

Can you say in what way ideal forms are facts?

Unseen wrote:
in Plato the forms enjoy far more facticity than things in the real world

Well, they don’t sound like the normal kind of facts.  A special Plato kind of facts.

Unseen wrote:
Plato’s forms aren’t facts and don’t exist.

They exist as perfect ideals.  Are perfect ideals facts?  It is a fact that something can be a perfect ideal.

But can a perfect ideal itself be a fact?  Does it have that status?

If someone travels to Mars or Pluto, or the Andromeda galaxy – is it still wrong to torture children for fun, in all those places?  If there were no people and no children there.

Unseen wrote:
Just say absolute ethical absolutes do/don’t exist and state why

I think that ethical absolutes in the sense you’re talking about do not exist.  They don’t have any medium within which to exist.

Mathematics and logic surely exist within the medium of physical logic, or at least originate in it, so mathematics and logic can be sa…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Like Plato’s forms, they can just exist as metaphysical facts.

Surely you mean metaphysical concepts.  A fact is something that by definition has some kind of existence.

Unseen wrote:
Go back to the example of the expert swimmer who doesn’t want to miss out on the new iPhone but sees someone drowning in a lake on his way. If he has a duty to save that life, where does that duty come from? What makes it a duty?

I believe that a “duty” is 1) what we expect of ourselves; and 2) what others expect of us.  So, we wo…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
What you believe is irrelevant to this conversation. Maybe it belongs in another discussion but it has no place here. So, unless you want to be ignored by me anyway, you’d better get with the program and discuss the topic at hand. For starters, just say whether you believe in absolutes which are overarching inviolable ethical a…

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Unseen wrote:
So you disbelieve in ethical absolutes and there is no such thing as actual right and wrong. Right and wrong are contingencies determined by individuals or social groups and are not in any way facts, which can be true or false in the sense of being true or false for everyone, and provably so(?)

I have this discussion with Christians…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Do you believe there are ethical absolutes independent of any facts, those facts including human contingencies like local attitudes and norms about values and behavior, traditions, customs, fears, prejudices, etc.?

I believe that one ethical absolute, that may not be the only one, is a combination of helping in response to need, and…[Read more]

What I mean is, the facts are arbitrary – they may or may not occur – but what type of morality you get as a result, depends on those facts.

I find that this is a problem, and a source of confusion in philosophy – people rely on a certain technical word, which can have several shades of meaning – instead of plain English explanations.  I think…[Read more]

Here’s another super-duper article by John Teehan, about the relationship between secular and religious ethics.

https://www.academia.edu/30951985/Ethics_Secular_and_Religious_An_Evolved_Cognitive_Analysis

To live in a secular age is to live our lives and pursue our goods within an “immanent frame.” The key feature of the “immanent frame” is that…

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Unseen wrote:
the word “real.” Likewise, “baked into the fabric of the universe”

The age-old philosophical question is, in what sense are moral statements true, in what sense is morality real?  Does it exist in the mind of God, or only in the minds of people?  (and their culture?)  Philosophers cling on to this idea of “moral truth”, and it scr…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
contingent versus necessary

Then morality is a cross between the two.  Given the contingent facts, then the fundamental structure of the way it’s put together is necessary.  The facts aren’t anything other than what they are.  The structure of morality has to be the way it is, given the facts.

This question is, is moral realism real?  Is human morality baked into the fabric of the universe?  In my opinion, that possibility is bizarre and religious.  But that isn’t an argument against it.  I think it’s hard to argue against it, except to observe that “value needs a valuer”, and therefore, ethical absolutes are contingent (they need a car…[Read more]

If there were no more priests around to hear the confessional – would the confidentiality of the confessional still be an overarching ethical absolute?