Those who stand for nothing fall for anything

Law is not in the business of telling good from evil or treating actions in accordance with judgements of this sort. We do not lock people up for being evil, we lock them up because we find that we are collectively better off separated from them for a while.
Now after reading TheDude's post I too was wondering what justice is about if it is not about evening the odds, evening the scales, if you will... Would we still have a system of punishment if it did nothing to decentivise other potential offenders? I don't think we can answer that. Could we call a system that serves only to decentivise potential offenders a system of justice if it did nothing to also punish those whom it had failed?

So, I'm gonna break from the whole moral relativism stream, and say that objective deontological ethics are compatible even when you start with solipsism.

Solipsism is the belief that everything you experience isn't necessarily Reality and could be falsified (think the matrix). All you can prove is a la Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" - I think therefore I am. Following that, you can prove that something else exists since you aren't omniscient.
Once you recognize that, you realize that your experience is a product of the relationship between you and everything else. Therefore morality is a framework that allows you to efficiently function with everything else. This is why most ethical rules boil down to the Golden Rule. However, when an ethical decision doesn't necessarily break that rule (think things like abortion, dealing with people who have broken the golden rule, victimless crimes), that's where most people just shrug and say "its all subjective anyways" and use fly by the seat of their pants ethics.
Kant came up with a rule to govern these called the Categorical Imperative.

Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

If everyone did something and there was no ill consequence, then it's ok to do. This creates a pretty brittle test to try actions against, but the results work.

Tl;dr I believe in objective truth as timeless, existent, and able to be comprehended by the average person.
*disclaimer* This does go against the grain of Jediism

Rex wrote: I believe in objective truth as timeless, existent, and able to be comprehended by the average person.
*disclaimer* This does go against the grain of Jediism[/size]

How does this go against the grain of Jediism?

Manu wrote: How does this go against the grain of Jediism?

From Jedi believe:

moral concepts are not absolute but vary by culture, religion and over time.

Rex wrote:

Manu wrote: How does this go against the grain of Jediism?

From Jedi believe:

moral concepts are not absolute but vary by culture, religion and over time.

I don't see them as inconsistent. Acknowledging that moral concepts vary by time and culture does not exclude that there is only one ultimate truth. Concepts is how we interpret the truth, Truth just is.

Rex wrote: Solipsism is the belief that everything you experience isn't necessarily Reality and could be falsified (think the matrix). All you can prove is a la Descartes "Cogito ergo sum" - I think therefore I am.

Yea, see, I keep hearing this from philosophers all the time, but so far none of them could explain how exactly claims of this sort can be proven without begging the question. Is it in fact conceivable that everything we experience could be falsified? Even if we say that every one thing can, it does not follow that all of them independently can. It is not illogical that the falsification of one specific experience is tantamount to verification of another, rendering it impossible for everything to be falsified at the same time.
And assuming that all experience in fact could be falsified all at once, how on earth could one possibly prove that either a thought exists without presupposing that thoughts can exist absent minds or that minds exist without presupposing that thoughts cannot exist absent minds? Since existence in any synthetic sense only makes sense as a relationship between things, in order to assert that anything exists, one needs to presuppose two different things with a relationship thus presupposing the very thing one is asserting!

Following that, you can prove that something else exists since you aren't omniscient.

Why is it so obvious that one isn't omniscient though? Again, this is begging the question. When we say mind M is non-omniscient, we mean that there exists M as well as a thing t₁ and for which the predicate R²(M,t₁) - M has the cognition-relation R towards t₁ - is false. The premise that M is non-omniscient already includes the desired conclusion that there exist at least this t₁. And absent that premise, that conclusion cannot be reached, of course.

Once you recognize that, you realize that your experience is a product of the relationship between you and everything else.

No, wrong again. Even if we assume that there are multiple things t₁,t₂,...,t_n other than the mind M, it is still not logically impossible that M's entire experience is generated from a strict subset of those things and not all of them. If all of those things be thoughts, to take a crude example, then by your suggestion after the quoted passage it would be possible to devise rules to conduct what we must or must not think. But of course Kant's Categorical Imperative and the Golden Rule only apply to actions towards other beings that are not M and so far we still haven't gotten past hard solipsism and can therefore not follow that interactions are at all possible.

There are of course other objections to raise against Kant's moral philosophy, but he is not here to defend himself, so I shan't argue against him. Suffice it to say that if I were to apply the Categorical Imperative as formulated by yourself consistently, I'd have to discard it because of itself. A maxim to gauge all actions by the Imperative is one that I personally would not will that it be made a universal law. That is, of course, a whole different story...

Gisteron wrote: Yea, see, I keep hearing this from philosophers all the time, but so far none of them could explain how exactly claims of this sort can be proven without begging the question. Is it in fact conceivable that everything we experience could be falsified? Even if we say that every one thing can, it does not follow that all of them independently can. It is not illogical that the falsification of one specific experience is tantamount to verification of another, rendering it impossible for everything to be falsified at the same time.
And assuming that all experience in fact could be falsified all at once, how on earth could one possibly prove that either a thought exists without presupposing that thoughts can exist absent minds or that minds exist without presupposing that thoughts cannot exist absent minds? Since existence in any synthetic sense only makes sense as a relationship between things, in order to assert that anything exists, one needs to presuppose two different things with a relationship thus presupposing the very thing one is asserting!

Yes, that's the whole point. Everything could be an illusion. The only things you can know are that you can think. But no one actually claims that is true (as far as I know), it's more a thought experiment. Yep, you're right: independent falsifiability of everything is tantamount to total falsifiability. That last bit ties in to why solipsism really assumes at least two entities exist, since everything is really defined by its relationship to something else.

Gisteron wrote: Why is it so obvious that one isn't omniscient though? Again, this is begging the question. When we say mind M is non-omniscient, we mean that there exists M as well as a thing t₁ and for which the predicate R²(M,t₁) - M has the cognition-relation R towards t₁ - is false. The premise that M is non-omniscient already includes the desired conclusion that there exist at least this t₁. And absent that premise, that conclusion cannot be reached, of course.

Yeah, I feel that assuming t₁ is fair for the aforementioned reason of definition by relationship (I was speaking on a very broad level, so I do oversimplify quite a bit).

Gisteron wrote: No, wrong again. Even if we assume that there are multiple things t₁,t₂,...,t_n other than the mind M, it is still not logically impossible that M's entire experience is generated from a strict subset of those things and not all of them. If all of those things be thoughts, to take a crude example, then by your suggestion after the quoted passage it would be possible to devise rules to conduct what we must or must not think. But of course Kant's Categorical Imperative and the Golden Rule only apply to actions towards other beings that are not M and so far we still haven't gotten past hard solipsism and can therefore not follow that interactions are at all possible.

Well, that's individual/experiential reality, not Reality; the M subset is ultimately informed by the whole set as everything in the subset is in relation to everything else that exists. I'm not sure why my oversimplified explanation doesn't relate equally to M as well as non-M since I would argue M is in a subset of M's reality.

Gisteron wrote: There are of course other objections to raise against Kant's moral philosophy, but he is not here to defend himself, so I shan't argue against him. Suffice it to say that if I were to apply the Categorical Imperative as formulated by yourself consistently, I'd have to discard it because of itself. A maxim to gauge all actions by the Imperative is one that I personally would not will that it be made a universal law. That is, of course, a whole different story...

The Categorical Imperative implies it's own contradictory nature? I'm not sure how you get that. The Categorical Imperative (as I understand it) applies to the reality subset of any M (M,t₁,t₂,...,t_n).

It seems like you attacked the semantics of my rusty understanding of the topic, what would you affirmatively argue?

Or would you postulate that in some events pedophilia is not evil?

Given that the "age of consent" is largely arbitrary...


(I raise it as a point as we are discussing morals - not in defence of any particular act)


As for the last few posts on deontological ethics and categorical imperatives - I have some views, but I'm not ready to joust words this early in the morning. Suffice to say that none of the various theories that have been suggested throughout time are "The Answer" - they can all be argued - but they provide a path, and are part of the question.

JamesSand wrote:

Or would you postulate that in some events pedophilia is not evil?

Given that the "age of consent" is largely arbitrary...

For the sake of the argument, let's assume that when I say pedophilia I do not include statuatory rape. Let's narrow it down to an adult male sexually penetrating a toddler against his will. I don't care if you tell me it's a rite of passage in xyz society. I believe it harms the child, and thus, is evil.

I believe it harms the child, and thus, is evil.

Bingo.

So harming a child is evil? (I believe more or less the same thing, but we're pinpointing morals here - and I don't know if I believe it because of morals, or because of a evolutionary demand that I protect the youth of my own species)

When does someone stop being a child, or are all acts that harm inherently evil?

(I wonder how different we would all be, had we nevered been harmed - is the fact that we survived an indication that the harm was not evil? or that evil in various amounts can be tolerated?)


(For this next bit I'm just being a sook, it's not wholly relevent to the rest of the discussion)

Let's narrow it down to an adult male sexually penetrating a toddler against his will.

So penetrating a female toddler is less evil?
An adult female engaging in sex acts against the others will is less evil?

Is the rating of the evilness the sex act, or the physical damaged caused by the assault of forcing something into somewhere it really doesn't fit?