hunterrose

*readies Ragnar's ship*

At what % does taking the risk become immoral? What constitutes immoral conduct? Marty thinks Marty subsequently suffers Ergo, thinking isn't necessarily beneficial tax collectors loot tax collectors don't subsequently suffer Ergo, looting isn't necessarily detrimental In what way is one invalid that the other isn't?

Well, if you're going to devilishly advocate Gary Brenner's argument, you might as well do it justice. First, Gary Brenner feels that thinking is not necessarily beneficial, nor any other behavior for that matter. Leading IMO to the argument that no behavior is necessarily moral or immoral, and there is no standard for acting ethically. Second, he "proves" that no behavior is necessarily beneficial/necessarily detrimental with examples along the lines of Marty thinks every day. One day, a meteor hits his home and annihilates Marty. Therefore, thinking isn't necessarily beneficial, and Rand is clearly wrong when she says otherwise. To him, being blindsided by space debris proves that thinking isn't a beneficial behavior. Third, in order to satisfy his standard of proof, he asks that I, in order to prove a behavior (like thinking) necessarily beneficial, show that every instance of thinking results in a beneficial state. In other words, an accident "proves" that thinking isn't beneficial, getting fired from one's job proves that last night's sex wasn't beneficial, ad naseum.

Ok. I understand that, and feel similarly toward my significant. But I don't follow how valuing new friends necessarily means devaluing old friends. Case in point, acknowledging that Halle is hotter doesn't mean that you devalue Kelly's hotness. (She might think otherwise, though ) Will do. As a general rule, I agree. But that's a long way from a case that monogamy is the only rational way to go or that monogamy is best for everyone as a universal rule.

What's your difference between "immoral" and "ethically prohibited"? Oh, I acknowledge that; I just don't see what your point is. Your premise is that no action is necessarily self-destructive, including looting and firing guns at one's head. Why would it matter which of your "not necessarily self-destructive" behaviors I use to disprove your premise? I'm suspecting that if you define "prohibition", no one would make the case that initiating force is prohibited (in your sense of the word, anyway) I can make a logical case that some behaviors are necessarily detrimental to the attaining of one's goal. As a segue to that, I have made the argument that if there is no behavior that is necessarily beneficial or necessarily detrimental to the attaining of one's goal, then there are no right or wrong choices, and thus no ethics. And you have repeatedly failed to acknowledge that. Ah, so you say that my argument is that not every fact of reality must be considered in determining whether X is necessarily beneficial/necessarily destructive. Sure, okay, let's go with that. Since you ask me to support that argument, I assume you disagree with it? Marty thinks every day. One day, a meteor hits his home and annihilates Marty. Therefore, thinking isn't necessarily beneficial, and Rand is clearly wrong when she says otherwise. ...do you see **ANYTHING** wrong with that conclusion? Anything at all?? Please don't tell me you agree with it...

So you say. In what context was the quote said? Then what should one prohibit? I don't think, by your argued case, that anything would be prohibited... which would make ethics (and any question over whether looting is destructive) moot? Objectivism wouldn't (and doesn't) say that. A major, major, major, major, major point you're missing is that there is a difference between risking one's life and throwing away one's life. An example would be a man who sees his hated enemy in peril, doesn't want to save him, but decides to do so out of peer pressure... but I suppose you consider acting out of obligation to not necessarily be self-destructive, just as you consider firing a handgun at one's head to be not necessarily be self-destructive? In answer to the gator example, that man wouldn't be immoral by my standards. In my judgement, whether he survived or not wouldn't make a moral difference. The primary comparison is that neither act has a 100% likelihood of loss of one's particular goal, and thus neither act (to you?) can be morally prohibited. What... do you think my argument is? There is more disagreement on that matter around here than you might think.

What would it mean to trade telling stupid jokes with someone else? And what would it mean to trade your girlfriend with someone else? So is it impossible for everyone? Or is it more time-efficient for most people? Or more time-efficient for everyone? I don't entirely agree with what you say here, but thank you for sharing it nonetheless. That's an interesting way to put it. I'll have to chew on that one!

Part of your error is that "survival" is not the standard. Slaves are surviving, brain-dead vegetables are surviving, Castro is surviving...

What do you say this is Rand's implication? Causality, I suppose. Doesn't it follow that every goal requires a specific (i.e. proper) course of action?

Your premise is that M is someone's standard of value... and then goes on to prohibit acts that are less likely to obtain M... without showing that said acts are necessarily not going to obtain M? Is this also a "logical gap"? No, you would say that X ought not put his life savings into a lottery if there are other methods that are more likely to gain the same amount of money. If X does put everything into the lottery, and wins despite the "immoral" odds, is X immoral for doing what was less likely to work? Or moral for gaining his sought-after value? If you don't agree that firing a gun at one's own head is destructive, how could I possibly convince you of something that isn't so obviously destructive like looting when you're not caught? You misunderstand me. We do look at the nature of the behavior to determine if it is beneficial/self-destructive. We do not look at ancillary factors that have nothing to do with the nature of the behavior in question. E.g. I can get struck by lightning while tending a farm, but this is not something that must (or ought) be considered in determining whether farming is a beneficial/destructive behavior. Such as?

Meta, how'd you get drawn into this? You knew what was going to happen This is a prickly one. I know I'd dislike it if my significant slept with someone I regard it as unworthy, as I suspect you would (I haven't read everything in the thread yet). As for her sleeping with someone else who's worthy...? I have a lot of feelings on that, some of which are neutral, some which aren't. The strongest of these feelings (i.e. not necessarily rational arguments themselves) is... if she wanted to sleep with one of these other worthies (in addition to sleeping with myself), what would it mean for her to say she loves me more than him? Dichotomies aside(?), this is one of those things in which I theoretically agree with you, but don't think I'd like the implications in practice. I will say that I don't think it's a matter of jealously or irrationality (for me) to be adamantly against polygamy in one's relationship, though I grant that it (along with good ol' prudery) may be a factor with others, perhaps. I'll think more about all of this (although this topic has come up multiple times, as you know! ) Just to fan the flames, that doesn't seem like indifference. Sometimes people are indifferent to things... and sometimes they merely put up with things. This is merely of idle curiousity (so don't answer if it's prying on my part), but how do you know she is actually indifferent? At the risk of being highly un-PC, just because a woman says she is indifferent to polygamy doesn't mean she is indifferent to it or that she wouldn't rather a monogamous relationship. Taking it for granted that you know the nuances and contexts of your own relationship much more than we casual forum folks do. Something... doesn't sit right with this to me, either, but I haven't identified it exactly. Something else for me to chew on. Depending on what you mean by "intimacy", I would think romantic love involves much more than an addition of sex and intimacy. I can imagine being intimate and having sexy time with someone who I have a platonic interest in, without it necessarily becoming romantic. I think the gap between the two is larger than sex+intimacy. That may be simplifying your stance here, though.

Sorry it took so long to get back to the board. I believe you at one point in time said something along the lines of your motivation for posting was to help create a stronger case for ethics by critiquing Objectivism's argument. My reason for asking the last question was that I don't think one can determine oughts if there are no action that are correct/incorrect in principle. Case in point, how does one objectively determine that Y increases probability of X? And more important, with what basis would you say that a person shouldn't have done something that decreased the probability of X if it, despite the odds, succeeds in obtaining X? You end up with the horrendous problems of how do you calculate what volitional men are going (or likely) to do, and basing oughts not on what works, but on what was likely to have worked. As for the original question about looting/self-destruction, (and I might have said this before) I think you're reading too much into it. I rather doubt that Rand meant that every crook is going to be caught by the authorities. I think her point was more along the lines of saying "putting a gun to your head and shooting is self-destructive". It's possible that the gun might malfunction or that the bullets you were told were real were actually fakes or someone put a metal plate in your head while you were sleeping, and if you're to be a stickler, you could thus say that such an action, any action, isn't necessarily self-destructive. But then you'd have to grasp at straws to justify not doing this or that Mission Impossible, because hey, it might just end up beneficial against all odds... I can understand (though not necessarily agree with) an idea that looting isn't always self-destructive. But you're IMO quite wrong that no behaviors are beneficial/detrimental outside of concrete, particular instances. For example, painting fences is not a detrimental behavior (outside of sacrificing greater values) regardless of whatever coincidental actions other people take as a response to my painting. Similarly, it doesn't make sense to say that looting isn't necessarily detrimental just because Keystone Cops can't investigate their way out of a paper bag. If there is an objective standard for determining whether a behavior is beneficial/self-destructive, you can't base it on statistical responses of others. You give some food for thought. I'm going to read through the rest of this thread and see what else I've missed. Nice avatar, blackdiamond

Then what acts of romantic love are not irrational to expose to a child? Hippies like public sex (as well as private sex???), and the "hippie sexual philosophy" is wrong, therefore having sex in front of your children (qua public sex) is wrong? I really wasn't trying to cause a problem for the sake of a problem or trick you into a debate, but your proof doesn't follow. A more analogous example would be one where Rand says "blue is a color for irrational people", and someone taking that as a philosophical statement. If what you are presenting as Rand's idea (concerning sex in front of your children) was presented as merely being Rand's personal (subjective) preference, I doubt there'd be any argument. But that's quite different from presenting it as Rand's view of philosophy which objectively applies to everyone.

As statements of philosophy, would you elaborate on these two? Do you mean that public sex is automatically sub-animal? (If not, in what situations is sex sub-animal?) What is an "exception-making value", and why do some/all of them require privacy?

Hmm. I am starting to understand you, though I must admit that your standard of proof baffles me. Question: How do you prove that a person with values X ought (or ought not) do behavior Y?

So... when you thrice said that you agree an irrational act is self-destructive regardless of its results, you actually meant that you think an irrational act is self-destructive depending on its results? Forgive me for misunderstanding you. One more clarification of "self-destructive", if you will. Eddie paints fences. Mao knocks him unconscious in as a result of his envy of superior whitewashing skills. You think painting fences here was self-destructive?

Let's not stipulate. If you demonstrate that cutting random wires on a bomb is ipso facto self-destructive, then I will submit what you ask for.

Why do you think Mao didn't destroy himself through his looting? Because of his lifespan and accumulation of appropriations. Then you agree that the act of accepting an irrational process is self-destructive regardless of the process's results in a given case. By your first standard of "destructive", an irrational process would be self-destructive depending on its results in a given case (e.g. playing the lottery and random defusing would be practical if you win, and destructive if you lose.) By your second standard of "destructive", if looting is irrational, then Mao's looting was self-destructive regardless of the process's results in his given case. And your pointing out his wealth/health is immaterial to the charge of destructive qua looting. I assume for the moment that you mean "destructive" qua the second sense, and that your Mao example is meaningless. 1,000th post

But how can that be? Say the value of a specific friend is X, and the value of a successful looting of said friend is 2 (in this case, a number I'll assume is less than whatever X represents.) X+2 is more useful than X, and if the chance of getting caught looting is sufficiently negligible, it's more pragmatic to earn the better consequence (looting + friendship). Which would mean that no friend is so valuable that a pragmatist wouldn't at least consider looting from them? I can see "looting from this friend isn't worth the risk in this or that particular instance" to be a pragmatic statement, though it's obviously not a principle. But how could you pragmatically come to a blanket statement that it is never useful to prey on this friend, no matter how low the prey-risk? This seems (to me) to be a failing (lack of useful principles in addition to being anti-friend ) that Pragmatism can't possibly answer.

Well, now I'm the newbie. I'd never heard of Being There, but it sounds very interesting after a googling (I imagine it's more different from Forrest Gump than you might expect, though.) I'm going to go get this and check it out.

Then the only thing that matters in determining if X is practical is whether you win or lose, right? What is the relevance of odds? I assume you understand the relevance of sN's point, if not mine. Equivocating is hardly the same as answering the question. At any rate, if you theoretically agreed that the act of accepting an irrational process was self-destructive, you'd be implicitly acknowledging that you Mao counterexample proves nothing. If you insisted the Mao counterexample was relevant, I'd probably then ask you what you'd meant by "destructive" as you would obviously be using it with two divergent meanings. Theoretically. If you theoretically disagreed that the act of accepting an irrational process (e.g. randomly cutting wires on a bomb) was self-destructive (regardless of whether you were unlucky enough to not meet your maker,) I would theoretically question your sanity and again ask what is your definition of "destructive".

Just saw 300 last night. It rocked IMO. As far as the hunchback (Ephialtes?) goes, I don't get the implication that Leonidas did something immoral in not letting Ephialtes fight alongside them. It seems merely a tactical decision (perhaps in hindsight a bad one given what Ephialtes subsequently did.) I'm surprised no one's similarly criticized Queen Gorgo for what she did in order to get more troops from Theron or her response to his treachery. I don't think either action was improper, but it seems to be a criticism along a similar line. (This may have been brought up earlier; I haven't yet read the whole thread.) Was anyone else amused when Theron's sheep fellow councilmen suddenly break out in "Traitor! Traitor!" after (and not until) Gorgo ends the "debate" with Theron?

I wouldn't say this last part is part of the theme. !!! You must be the only one I highly, highly recommend it, but those are just my tastes. I would say the "accident/luck" assessment is misleading (and a "not working hard" assessment to be incorrect.) Gump certainly worked hard, had a strong will, etc. and a person could just as well say Bill Gates's success was an accident. Either of them might not have been as successful if chance had been different. But they'd be successful nonetheless. Most definitely.

Hmm. Can there, according to pragmatism, be such a "friend" that no prey-reward is high enough and no prey-risk low enough to merit preying on them? I personally think not, as no matter how valuable a friendship is worth, friendship+friend's loot is still more valuable to the pragmatist. But then is it possible for the pragmatist to derive (from pragmatism) principles such as "it is virtuous to prey on enemies" or "it is virtuous to not prey on friends"?

Good enough for me. Your mother sounded like a strong woman. I'm sure she'll continue to be an inspiration for you and your family.