Simon Paynton

Unseen wrote:
So, are duties awful, useless, toxic, dangerous, harmful, and garbage?

A duty is ideal performance that we owe to others and ourselves – in other words, to “us”.  Morality is a shared social enterprise, so necessarily, it is absolutely true that morality involves duties.  A duty has a three-fold structure I believe: 1) the need f…[Read more]

I agree that it’s situational, but it has, surely, to have some kind of absolute authority.

You would think that morality has to be grounded in the “absolute”, otherwise it doesn’t carry any weight. But what absolute? Facts? Values? It can be grounded in the fact of cooperation, or of sexuality and pair-bonding. It helps us negotiate those things successfully.

Religions ground their morality in an absolute giver of absolute laws.

Ivy wrote:
anyone not looking at the world with that same sense of morality is wrong.

Yes, I think people are often very parochial when it comes to talking about morality.  All they know, is their own one.  But there is a plurality of morality all over the world.  In “The Social Instinct”, Nichola Raihani talks about how in Eastern, co…[Read more]

I think it’s possible to construct an ethical system on what humans find normative – these things are treated as absolute.  Compassion, fairness, conforming to ideal standards are all evolutionarily necessary to the individual.  But that pushes the motivation back to what is necessary for the individual.  However, we don’t live as individuals, we…[Read more]

Quite possibly, the octopus dies because it has reproduced, and is no longer needed.  I heard in the Nichola Raihani vs. Michael Shermer podcast in this week’s Sunday School, that there is an evolutionary reason why human grandmothers survive past reproductive age.  They are helping their grandchildren to survive by helping to look after them, s…[Read more]

Davis wrote:
The advantage of having a critical mind is the ability to develop either overarching theories or principles that help dictate rules, some of them more flexible than others (utilitarian for that matter).

It’s interesting you should mention utilitarianism.  The pressure to thrive + a prosocial attitude leads to a version of…[Read more]

In morality, a norm is something that people think is good, rather than something which is normal.  I can think of some norms that are hard to account for, like the norm against homosexuality.  I think this has to do with two things: 1) the sacredness of the male-female pair bond for the purpose of reproduction (“no sex outside marriage”); and 2…[Read more]

_Robert_ wrote:
I think your “philosophy” should be flexible and it is beneficial to be able evolve to fit the changing environment.

I definitely think that philosophers should be flexible enough to listen to new facts that come along, and to change their philosophy if necessary.