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ppw

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Everything posted by ppw

  1. This is great, thanks! This actually supports my definition. Go figure.
  2. That's not an understanding of the naturalistic fallacy as put forth by Moore, who argues that the concept of the good is irreducible. What you quoted was my re-definition. (I had hoped to make that clear.) Otherwise I have to throw them all out, because none of them are valid. They just represent a battle between two kinds of intrinsicism; "ethical intuitionism" and "ethical naturalism".
  3. I was trying to reach an objective definition of this batch of fallacies, and I'm finding it very difficult because of all the rationalism involved in the sources. I was hoping someone else already had it figured out. The only way to make these fallacies 'work', in my conclusion, is to take nature as existence apart from man as the definition, and then observe the fact-value distinction with that in mind: Moral statements cannot be derived from facts in nature. To do so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. Nature cannot be morally evaluated (based on Pinker's examples) and moral sentiment does not determine facts of nature (based on Wikipedia's examples). To do either is to commit the moralistic fallacy. The anti-naturalistic fallacy, and even Frankena's 'definist fallacy' in this context evaporate, so I'm dismissing them. As for is-ought: I'm not ready to deal with that yet. I file 'application of a moral principle' under 'deduction', maybe that's a problem.
  4. What I quoted was the mistaken description of the is-ought fallacy, still visible in my original post, that you fixed post festum.
  5. Thanks, Greg. I don't think even Wikipedia knows what the is-ought problem is. "Statements about what is on the basis of statements about what ought to be." It's reversed!
  6. I mean, are you guys just going to keep switching contexts, or what?
  7. And what view of objectvity do you think made possible that idea?
  8. How could they not? Their entire conception of objectivity is Kantian:
  9. P) A clock is a device used to measure, keep, and indicate time. C) A clock ought to keep the time.
  10. Can someone help me understand this nonsense?
  11. Here's how I see it now, a year later. We - and by "we" I mean people concerned with ideas - are different "beasts" than most people. We care about what we say and we scrutinize what we listen to, sometimes heavily (I'm not going to say 'too much', because I don't think there's such a thing as "overthinking".) This is different from the policies most other people employ, one common of which is "say something so you don't appear unsociable", so what you get is ... what's that word .... bromides. Most people you deal with in your everyday life don't have integrated (or largely integrated) minds, just a random, compartmentalized collection of ideas they picked up along the course of their lives. 'Random' isn't exactly the right word - sometimes a second-hander's ideas are not "picked up" at random - sometimes the principle is to uphold some emotion - but you get the point. I like the term 'hollow imitators' - it serves to bring the point home. Cultivating the virtue of pride helps a lot in dealing with people you encounter in everyday life. It's important to identify when (and if) the person is 'gone' - when you can no longer reach them, when they're past the point of no return, when dealing with them is a waste of your time. And you need to have the necessary self-respect and the respect of your own time to know to cut yourself off from the conversation or even from the relationship (if there was one at all). But the flipside is just as important. You need to "keep your eyes open" for people who are good, who are concerned with ideas, who do care about what's right and what's wrong, who do try to live according to what they believe in. So go out to that dinner if perchance you meet such people - don't cut yourself off from potential new relationships that might be of benefit to you, but don't go to dinner if your sole reason is to appear sociable. Small talk is that "testing ground" - the place where two people start assessing each other. "Small" is a misnomer - it's actually 'big' in terms of social importance to both of the participants, because it can either lead into a stronger relationship or the opposite. For example, observe how people who take smoke breaks develop stronger relationships with each other. Those are the general principles. It's your job to develop the 'social algorithm' that fits you and your values. And it doesn't happen overnight.
  12. That just makes the use of the term 'libertarianism' worse, not better. It renders it meaningless, because it identifies nothing essential in particular.
  13. If there is no free will, I would have no choice but to agree with you. I don't agree with you.
  14. I disagree with your premise that suffering instills virtuous character. It doesn't. Do try to differentiate "jumping to conclusions" from "forming a definite interpretation". I've provided ample reasons why my conclusion is the way it is. Also, and this is the last thing I'm going to say in this topic: ambiguous endings definitely do not serve to provoke thought, on the contrary, they serve to paralyze it. They are a cheap device of non-objective art, a trope whose proponents claim that it "lets the mind fill the emptiness with its own content", or in other words, making art subjective.
  15. Even if he did survive, they didn't choose to make that a point in the movie, did they? No, his survival was irrelevant, the creators wanted us to know. They did, however, show us him preparing a tiny altar to his wife and kissing her goodbye, then putting gloomy music over it. His preparations for the fight were more in line with him making a last stand out of desperation than actually gearing up to win. But even if he did win, the rest of the pack would come back and finish the job, and I'm basing this on the pure viciousness of the creatures portrayed in the movie, not on general knowledge of wolf behavior.
  16. Hah, just check out what the movie inspired a commenter on YT (watch?v=ZZPFp19AOKI) to write up: "Another day i rise to the fight Another day i wait for the end A day when i rest and never rise again Is the day i long for till i meet my end" It's almost eerie how closely it matches what I was arguing about. This is what people take away from the movie.
  17. Yes, and about how completely impotent that will is in the face of existence. they spend the entire movie fighting for their lives, only to get slowly picked off, one by one. instead of finding shelter or encountering humans, they end up at the source of all of their deaths, precisely what they were trying to get away from the entire time, thus cementing their fate. the main character, in the end, concludes that nothing really matters but "the fight" to stay alive, without any reference to values, purpose, goals or anything remotely connected to the mind. but the movie tells us that even that doesn't matter, because they all die in the end. metaphysical importance is ascribed to death (the poem is but one reference). Death is viewed as a valid goal. (Similarly to Mr. Smith saying "the purpose of life is to die".) I don't mean 'self-sacrifice' in the usual sense of giving up a bigger value for a lesser value, or even giving up life for some prescribed "noble" goal (e.g. like Christ), that's why I gave it a different term. I mean it in the worst possible sense: shutting down the mind, leaving it all to automatized materialistic self-sustaining action, and hoping for an early death. That's what his dad was about, it's what the poem was about, it's what the Communists tried to achieve in man (destruction of the ego), and it's nihilism.
  18. It's fiercely nihilist if anything. As one IMDb poster summed up quite brilliantly when discussing the meaning of the title: "Yeah, Lian Neeson wears a grey sweater throughout the movie, and the color is washed out of most of the photography in post production. There's also a lot of shots of grey indistinct exteriors, most of the men have either salt-and-pepper hair or ice in their hair that makes it look grey, and there's the scene where Ottway is yelling at God, and he stares up into the grey, cloudy sky. It's pretty clear that "The Grey" is actually a reference to both the existential and emotional condition of man as he confronts death, and to the natural world's indifferent disposition toward humanity, and to the uncertainty and indistinctness associated with death. It's a loaded title. The main wolves in the movie don't even look like grey wolves." The poem supposed to convey the central theme of the movie "Once more into the fray, Into the last good fight I'll ever know, Live and die on this day, Live and die on this day." is about willful, deliberate self-annulment, as an end in itself. Self-sacrifice "Kantian style".
  19. It's not "tautologies" that are a methodological guide - it's the law of identity. Introducing contradictions into discussions of some subject denies the identity to that subject. That's the principle that should be tended to: don't hold contradictions.
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