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gio

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Everything posted by gio

  1. You can base a consequentialist morality on the idea that inequality is the good.
  2. It is a category in the sense that it can include an infinity of different moral doctrine. A moral doctrine that considers death and destruction as the good can be as much a consequentialist morality as a doctrine that considers happiness to be the good, as long as they both consider that all means are equals.
  3. It only means that the only principle they have is the wish for such consequence, if you prefer. Provided we can call that a principle.
  4. There is no answer for the supermarket question applying to consequentialist. First, it depends on what consequence he considers to be good. (Since consequentialism is not a moral doctrine itself, but a category of moral doctrine.) And secondly, his action can not be determined: he will choose any means which seems to him leading to the consequence he considers to be good, without any code or principle. And we do not know by what process he will choose that this means are more suitable than others. (It can be reason, instinct, faith, whim...anything.)
  5. Assuming this is the only thing that anyone (nobody else can't do anything) can do to prevent the other to die, sending 1000 workers to stop a nuclear plant meltdown, without any element of context, does not equate murdering 1000 people by itself. It depends of many elements of the context. Sending 1000 soldiers (or more) in a war to save the country, for example, is not human sacrifice most of the time, for sure. (And a war is often an emergency.) You are not necessarily murdering 1000 people. For many reasons. It depends of the context. It's not an issue of details, but of context. The context is important. You can not properly evaluate the morality of an action without the context. My moral objection is Objectivist ethics. You don't have to sacrifice human life when you don't have to do it. In the context of the original question, the liquidators have not all been deadly damaged. But anyway, assuming it was the case, this is, of course, an important point, since you are falsifying their judgment, and thus, their actions. (And this is why force and fraud are wrong.) Oh please, give me a break...
  6. In the context of the original question, it was a fake alternative. Can you be more specific and describe a real situation where the only thing you can do to prevent an whole city or country from dying is to murder 1000 people?
  7. Emergency situation are unproper to build morality, but it doesn't mean morality doesn't apply. And in this case, human sacrifice is still immoral. That does not mean that we should not do something. It simply means that in "doing something", sacrificing humans to save others is inappropriate. (In the proper meaning of the word sacrifice.)
  8. I didn't say consequentialist does not know how to act. They have a goal, but no principles. They act without any moral code or principles or virtues. (They think their goal by itself is moral) Consequentialism is very simple, it's only the famous aphorism: The end justifies the means. For example, I was arguing with someone some time ago. I said that an ethics of life did not tolerate human sacrifice. And he asked me if, in my opinion, at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, the USSR should not have sent the "liquidators". The USSR sent thousands of men without any protection knowing well that many would die (but without them knowing it at the beginning) in order to avoid a greater misfortune that would have contaminated the capital of the Ukraine and much of Central Europe. In other words, they sacrificed humans to save many more. I told him that the USSR should not have done this and, for him, I was "out of reality", he wanted to show me that it was not a question of morality but of "efficiency" . He thought that I was a deontologist, that I had a theory of intrinsic value: he did not say it with these words of course, but that's what he meant, obviously. He did not see any other alternative. He also claimed to be an admirer of Machiavelli. Here you have a typical example of consequentialist. Machiavelli is quite in this kind of category, as Ludwig von Mises also was at some degree. I'm sure that person I was arguing with was atheist, materialistic, empiricist and probably "pro-science". This is an example of muscle mysticism, or Attila. The "package-deal" Witch Doctors (Mystics of the spirit) is often: God Metaphysical idealism Transcendence / pure mysticism Rationalist Realistic in the quarrel of universals Intrinsic theory of value Deontology Free will Conservative While the "package-deal" Attila (Mystics of the muscle) is often: Atheist Metaphysical materialism Positivism and separation between fact and values Empiricism Nominalist in the quarrel of universals Subjective theory of value Consequentialism Determinism Liberal They both agree to divorce percepts and concepts, one choose the side of floating concepts, the other choose the side percepts without principles. The first are the heirs of Plato, the second are the heirs of the sophists.
  9. Intrincism is not the same kind of category as deontology or consequentialism. But deontology seems to me necessarily based on intrincist theory of value. Consequentialism or deontology must derived from a theory of value. I do not think we can do the opposite. (Derived a theory of value from deontology or consequentialim...this makes no sense to me.)
  10. A consequentialist has nos guidance. We can not really know how he will act. He will act by any means he thinks (how? we don't know) will leads to such consequence. An Objectivist will act according to the values and principles that he rationally concludes to be good for his own life.
  11. SpookyKitty, I advise you to watch the course on the History of Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff. This is not rationalism. Logic, like mathematics, ultimately comes from sensory experience, which is the way of grasping reality. There is no clash between percepts and concepts.
  12. I come back to the fundamental question of the topic which is: "Is objectivism consequentialist?" This time I've read most of the topic (not all because a lot of messages seem to deviate from the original subject) and I felt trouble in the force. Sorry if I made mistakes in English, it's not my primary language. As 2046 rightly said, the point of Grames (page 5), which says consequentialism is an "empty doctrine" is invalid in itself, because consequentialism is not a moral doctrine as such, but simply a category of moral doctrine. The generally opposite category, deontology, is also "empty" and silent about on what the good is. Grames (and others) makes another mistake in believing that "every theory of good and of the virtues is trivially consequentialist" and that one can "bolt the standard objectivist of value - your own life - onto consequentialism" because Objectivist ethics is actually incompatible with the consequentism, I will explain why. It's pretty simple. I will use quotations from Rand and Peikoff that have already been given several times in this topic, but which, I think, have not always been clearly understood. The reasoning of StrictlyLogical (who, if I understand well, thinks that Objectivist ethics is compatible with consequentialism) are sometimes brilliant, but he has just missed a crucial point. Objectivist ethics can not be classified as consequentialist for exactly the same reasons that Ayn Rand rejected utilitarianism and hedonism. What is consequentialism? Taking the consequence as the sole standard of good. YES, the Objectivist ethic deals with causality, so it fully takes into account the consequences (which is why some people seems troubled), BUT it does not consider the consequences as the standard of the good. The pursuit of values does not imply consequentialism. To know whether Objectivist ethics is consequentialist or not, the crucial question is not: Should the consequences be taken into account in a moral theory? (The answer is YES, of course, otherwise we fall back anyway into the intrincist theory of value). The crucial question is: WHERE does morality lies? In the action? In the consequences of the action? Both ? In the relationship between the two? Or elsewhere? Here is why, in short, Objectivist ethics is not consequentialist: Consequentialism confuses the consequences of morality with morality itself. In other words, it confuses the standard with the purpose of morality. Consequentialism says: morality does not lies in action, but exclusively in the consequences of action. Objectivist ethics does not say that. Think about the relation between morality and consequences like the relation between knowledge and emotions, because it's exactly the same kind of relation. Values are knowledge, and emotions are consequences. Ayn Rand used to say: "Emotions are not tools of cognition." because emotions are consequences of ideas or knowledge and not idea or knowledge by itself. We can also say somehow : "Consequences are not tools of morality". Back to the fundamental question: Why does man need a moral code? (Any moral code.) In order to guide his action. And action is always a mean. In other words, morality always deals with means. Of course it is necessary to have a goal, values (to give meaning to the action-means), but the goal alone is not enough (contrary to the consequentialist view), there must be a standard for discriminating actions that are consistent with this goal and actions that are not. In other words, a standard is needed to identify the virtues. Why do we need a standard? Why do our actions need to be guided by a moral criterion? Because man does not have automatic knowledge. He does not function by instinct, and he is not omniscient, a human being can not fully foresee the future when he acts, he do not know in advance all the consequences. (Which would be a pre-condition of consequentialism ...) So he needs a guide, that is to say a moral code. As it has been said by many of you, we can not evaluate actions post-facto ... We must therefore identify a standard that accords with the purpose, where we can rationally show the necessary dependency relation between the standard and the purpose as a cause-and-effect relationship (life is the cause, the effect is happiness, as Ayn Rand says in the following quote). According to Objectivist ethics, life is not the consequence or the purpose of morality, it is the standard. The purpose is happiness. Life is the ultimate value because it is the condition of happiness. Without life, there is no happiness. But life is not an action. Life is the standard that makes it possible to judge the morality of an action, in other words, whether it is virtuous or not. Moral action is virtue, and it is practiced by choice. A consequentialist morality such as utilitarianism for instance, says: What is the purpose of morality? Happiness. (We agree.) But then immediately it says: So, everything that makes you happy is good. Happiness is the good. But it is not happiness that is moral as such. Happiness is a consequence of a proper morality. In other words, happiness is not the good, happiness is a consequence of the good. There is confusion in utilitarianism between standard and purpose. To say: "the consequences are the moral standard" is a contradiction, it's like saying: "morality is useless" or "morality does not serve to guide action" or "man does not need a guide to action." To say, as consequentialism claims, that morality does not lie in action is to say that virtue does not exist. There is no moral code, no moral principles. For example, imagine that I am faced with an alternative. To determine how I should act, I will think, "I must choose my action according to such consequence." (happiness for instance) This is the consequentialist morality in its totality. This is not wrong in itself, but there is no morality yet: it is obviously insufficient to guide the action. Then I have to think and tell myself: "What actions would cause this consequence?" How to know? (In other words, what virtues should I practice?) In short: I need a moral code. In itself, having a purpose (happiness for example) is necessary, but not enough to determine a rational action plan. How do you determine what makes you happy? The moral code (life for example) is used to identify how to achieve this purpose. The purpose of your life.
  13. The essential question remains unanswered: Has Aristotle essentially favored or retarded science?
  14. I understand your point, but my topic is: the relationship between Aristotle and science. The point of the controversy being: Has Aristotle essentially favored or retarded science? Or at least many. Common examples given are: The world divided into five elements (fire, water, air, earth, ether) The rejection of the atomistic vision of the world. The division of the world between the terrestrial world and the sublunary world (eternal and undergoing no change) The Earth being motionless. His description of the movement of an object is false (as against Galileo and Newton who get out of his vision). The idea that there is no evolution of the living being.
  15. Have you ever heard this common idea that Aristotle was the enemy of science? That all his conclusions were scientifically erroneous; that his method was not scientific at all; that it was only when, in the Renaissance, we got rid of the thought of Aristotle (with the aristotelician Scholastics) that modern science was finally established? When you hear that, how do you react?
  16. I don't see how it contradicts what Jan Helfeld said. Here is a new video, with unusual topic for him.
  17. Because you said : ...which assumes that reason does not imply experience. You separate them.
  18. You assume that reason doesn't imply experience, divorcing experience and reason.
  19. I thought your question was "What ought to be?" to solve an aporia.
  20. Are you saying that you dismiss the very principle of ultimate value as such?
  21. After 2.500 years, we are still dealing with Heraclitus...
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