/lit/ - Literature

>>3130233
The problem with analytical moral philosophy is that it approaches morals as if they functioned through rational argument, which they don't.

>>3130218
>accepting the consensus

I'm pretty sure there are close to 0 moral nihilists who care about consensus-based legitimation of arguments.

What you are looking for is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There is a book by Anna Wierzbicka called English: Meaning and Culture which makes points like yours, I think it's rubbish.

>>3130054

My problem is with 'contingently false', because that basically means that the truth value is not a feature of the sentence, but a feature of an assemblage of sentence and context:

sentence =: q
context =: c
truth value =: T
y and x and two different contexts

Now, the moral relativist claims to be saying:

if c = x then T (q) = 1
if c = y then T (q) = 0

However, I would argue that they are really saying:

T (q, y) = 0
T (q, x) = 1

so that even in their own system of moral relativism, truth values are not something that can be ascribed to moral judgements as propositions (in themselves), but only to pairs made up of moral judgements as propositions and moral contexts (moral axioms, conventions, etc.).

Somehow I fail to see why the difference between moral relativism and moral nihilism matters. Since a moral relativist acknowledges the existence of different moral judgements about the same act, according to different moral systems, how could anyone not immediately proceed from this to the realization that none of these moral frameworks has any claim to validity for the evaluation of any specific act that could be measured by a standard extraneous to it, and that thus the act itself does not have moral properties? Moral Relativism seems to be merely a way of stating that you acknowledge the accuracy of nihilism but for personal or professional reasons prefer not to identify as a nihilist.

I'm sure some of you think I am wrong and dumb, but you don't need to tell me that, because I guessed it already. Instead, why don't you tell me how a moral relativism would work that does not slide into moral nihilism?

>>3130014
>Yes, philosophy is not value-free in the same way that science or any other discipline is not value-free. If that's all you're trying to say then yes, fine, but that doesn't discount the field in any significant measure.

No, I'm saying that the influence of personal values on one's engagement in the field has a qualitatively different status in the philosophy of ethics (and meta-ethics) than it does in any other discipline.

>>3130015
>So you haven't actually engaged the idea and not problem of separation of something like ethics and meta-ethics at all,

I'm not sure how you arrived at that conclusion. I have engaged the problem of the logical relationship of ethics and meta-ethics in the context of engaging with a specific thinker, I fail to see how that means that I have engaged it 'not at all'.

>>3130000
>The fact that ethical positions require meta-ethical positions doesn't imply that the reverse is true, nor that the disciplines are parasitic.

Well, that is true. However, I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'parasitic'. Surely, any meta-ethical position has an influence on ethics insofar as it prioritizes certain ethics above others (or even insofar as it might not), and surely the willingness to defend any meta-ethical position will depend on whether or not it is compatible with the philosopher's ethical constraints, be they consciously held tenets or unconscious psychological binds.

>>3129998
okay... basically my engagement with this problem revolves around the question of whether Stirner's writings contain an ethics. It's not an easy question, and I'm not sure you want to read about it, but if you are interested I can try to flesh this out for you.

>>3129983
>We're talking about meta-ethics, not ethics.

Whenever I try to separate the two, it turns out that I really cannot do so neatly. Any ethical position already implies a certain meta-ethical position, there seems to be something like a mutual infection, a spillage. Sorry if that sounds french, I just can't put my finger on it at the moment.

>>3129975
You are so dumb, it's not even funny. So everything that is a university subject is automatically useful? Nice display of independent thought right there. Of course the question is 'useful for what'. However, I would dare to make the claim that the vast majority of moral philosophy is useless insofar as it is neither actively involved in causing or influencing the actually effective moral norms in a society, nor does it even investigate how these norms really come about. The more 'analytical' such a philosophy is, the more it tends to focus on formal rational arguments that are completely detached from how human beings really navigate their lives. I'm not a Marxist, but from analytical moral philosophy I always get a sense of ideological self-deception.

If we accept that morals and ethics exist purely by virtue of people acting according to them, a sociology of morals would be superior in every way to a philosophy of morals.

>>3129889
>>implying that academic philosophy has not confronted the idea of the nonexistence of objective morals since Hume or well before that without collapsing

The mere fact that it exists hardly proves that it is not useless...

>>3129357
Yes, which is why Dan Brown is not a published author.

>>3129270

Noice.

>>3129932
a) We don't have the context, but the post has a relatively conciliatory tone and is more or less coherent, which is more than you can say of the average post on /lit/.

b) He does not really 'appeal' to nihilism. Yes, the points you mentioned are also brought up on /lit/ a lot, but usually in a more angry-teenager sort of way than this.

>>3129909

Are you shitting me? That post would be easily outside of the 2sigma interval of /lit/s standard distribution of post quality, on the good side.

>>3129851
>best artists
>Justin Bieber

I see what you did there!

>>3129871
What are you even trying to say?

It is cool, also there is a character in Matter who inhabits a robot body structured like a tree (not the biological one, but the mathematical one), in accordance with Hans Moravecs pretty cool transhumanist (I hate that word and the people associated with it) ideas from the 80s.

>>3129749
>noosphere

pffff.... Go to bed, Teilhard de Chardin.

>>3129793
>>This board is the most dignified on 4chan. If that's any consolation.

AHAHAHAHHAHAhahaha

It is simple, senteces don't have truth values like that. It just doesn't work.

I would like to try the exercises in Gestalt Therapy, but I am too lazy to read the book... I meditated for a while, feels good.