What an ignorant and just plain weird thing to say that to someone only wishing to further a conversation instead of taking the words at face value and offering your own answers to the questions raised. Did you not begin the thread with a question left unanswered, and so then is all and any questions raised there afterward by anyone a horror to you? What could possibly rankle or fear you about questioning a definition, a moral baseline that is vital to any debate or discussion? Why take it personally as well as try to raise an army at your side to defend an attack that never actually came, to create division where there never was any? There must be a sort of Maypole from which we all all connected so that we might dance, never straying afar from the central theme, to that tree which is the ground and center of our shared connection.

Chill.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Dec 13, 2018

it also can improve morals

 

Music combined with cosmic dance certainly can improve a mean base.

 

Certain questions, we ask, without ever intending to "find out" the answer. Many have wondered what E = mc2 actually means but would never actually try to find out. The question of the ontological status of moral propositions requires a lenghty, expensive formal research program. Are you willing to do this?!?!?

 

Of course they don't as it is only opinions that are discussed here. Yours is a philosophical question begging discussion without definitions that can be properly discussed and debated. If you had taken a 101 level course you would better understand the need as well as concept and couldn't and wouldn't go there. Nothing can be achieved by hollow banter except negativity, and which these kind of threads break down and illicit each and every time...which really is a drag as absolutely nothing of merit is or can be achieved by such an empty exercise of ego baiting and fist waving. So again, what is, as the OP of this thread, your personal definition of morality that the discussion can be both educational as well as thought provoking, and can carry some form of gravitas so is not a waste of time and bandwidth?

 

I love when music corrupts my moral behaviours

 

Delay Lama always did aweful things to my ears and was quite hurtful...still is. Thanks for the bad acid, painful flashback. Oy,
weh ist mein welt.

 

"Ontological questions are generally beside the point, hardly more than a form of harassment." -- Noam Chomsky [misquote]

Again, I reiterate, you cannot ask for a definition of a concept (Morality); as the concept is itself a definition. (Wittgenstein said you cannot define "game" since games have nothing in common with each other: some are played on boards, some on fields, with balls, with cards, by people, or animals, for fun, for money, to win, or for no reward; the best you can do is find family resemblances:--the word "game" is itself a definition of these "family resemblances"). Furthermore, since morality is relation there can be no ostensive definition: if I say @superliquidsunshine looks like Hitler, I can point to a picture of Hitler, and a picture of @superliquidsunshine; however, I cannot point to a picture "looking like." The relation of similarity cannot be ostensively defined.

The biological sciences have something to say about "mutual empathy" in the organic world (women synchronise their menstrual cycles if they live together, etc), perhaps, this is where we should look for an understanding of morality. There are forms of morailty everywhere, sometimes, even traversing the species boundary: you have dolphins who rescue drowning humans....etc

I have said enough.

 

Today's music infuses only fresh senses of stupidity into the international scenes than the innocent corruption.

The true corruption is more exciting than the stupidity.

 

post #152: its' nice to see that we all agree that the answer is...............time for a new thread?..................

 

I have to disagree.
It was reply # 152.
The first post was the question, so it might be considered post # 153.
The answer ... is getting more elusive.
Being KEPT elusive, perhaps.
Philosophy asks every question but gives no answers.
Philosophy, done properly can undermine any claim about any thing, and so can by itself claim nothing.

 

I vest this perilous authority in someone else and also pay for that.

Think twice beforehand.

 

It's far from nothingness to manage to undermine every concepts, it's actually a strong point regarding concepts, this concept itself of course cannot escape its own sentence.
Conceptualizing is vanity.

Edit : ironically Wittgenstein did show that in his Tractacus, which focuses on what can be told or not regarding the world and reality through the link between our langage and the world, and how the structure of langage itself determines the meaning (maybe its limitation too). Fun read, short but you know. Not sure anyone understood, even Russel didn't according to Wittgenstein.
And also he considered that his book was the end of the story, what had to be told was told, demonstrated.
Then he changed his mind and started many years latter to destroy his own previous work in his last reflections...
Fascinating dude really.

 

Last edited: Dec 14, 2018

I do alot of reverse engineering, but this one is about songs.

 

Common boundaries are not elusive but are rather fixed and of stuff that can be rationalized, defined and agreed upon...as well as your crossing the line of decency as the incredible asshole and obvious lowlife you have just defined yourself as, I am sure all can definately agree upon, by comparing me to Hitler even tangently in your ridiculous argument, the devil who killed in entirity all of my remaining family that hadn't come to the USA before the war, all 18 of them as well as millions of others. Fuck you you low piece of shit.

 

I have to read it and then try to see what effect it has on me...
I can't imagine I would understand "it", but who knows what of it some parts of.
Of course those brain parts might understand it wrong, but if he was right that he was wrong then it will be all right!
Seriously though ,the language aspect of "understanding" are crazy interesting.
The way we think is determined by language?
Keeping that in mind as much as possible over a little time is a freakout, and the implications are scary...
All the "hard" things I "know" become ambiguous interpretations of symbolic representations...
...But that is just my conscious intellect of the moment, and the brain is so much more than that ...MOSTLY more than that.

I may seem down on philosophy and to dislike or even fear relativism, but it's just that familiarity breeds contempt.
I know all their dirty secrets, and had to clean up too much after them...

But they are invaluable tools...understanding what can't be claimed about facts or morals seem prerequisite to understanding accurately what is (relatively) "true" and (relatively) of "value".

 

Reply #757: If someone could bring up jesus as well as hitler then we will know that this thread has finally reached the bottom of the barrel.....play nice guys......can we at least disagree respectfully? or shall we just mimic the divisions in the world around us without considering if our opinion is really that important.....? It's through realising when we are wrong that we can grow in having better interactions with others or just by being right and not having to win.....Write a summary of all the opinions here and it still won't answer the question.....but at least try and be moral in your interactions with others here.

 

Questionning everything - including relativism - is a good thing.

Different things though, I wouldn't qualified Wittgenstein as a relativist, even in the way it's usually said about several school of thoughts which imo is a bit an unfair critic - in fact his work with the tractacus aimed at forging a "perfect" langage that would be fit to describe reality and thus tells undisputable truth about it. It's a bit a scary project if you ask me. Ambivalence in langage is freedom, and dictatorship always go after langages first, they try to restrict the meaning of things, banish some expressions.
About relativism. I'm from a school of thought that gets called that quite often. I remember arguing hard with a treacher in poltical philosophy during my uni years, on that specific matter.
His line was about the same as yours (I think originaly it's K.Popper who wrote that), anyhow he was saying that deconstruction movement and specifically the figure of P.Bourdieu was in the middle of an aporia, since they argue that every single claims of the social world isn't just neutral and fruit of pure reflexion and reason, anyone speaking is always speaking from "somewhere" in the social world, and they always at least partially reflect the area of the social world they speak from, which concretely manifest itself by dispositions (structured themselves by various capital, agents can rely on). So evidently Bourdieu himself should be the fruit of that, and his work also is the fruit of that, and thus he shouldn't even try to produce anything, because it will always be the fruit of his disposition, etc.
Except Bourdieu (or Foucault with his épistémé, or Derrida with his deconstruction process, any constructivist school really) never said that what he says about the social world invalidates any truthfullness there may be in the intellectual or social production various agents offer. He just says that those dispositions are often a key to explain why the person who does research or intellectual work does what he or she does (which obviously is something that applies to him) and they also can severely guide you in many of your "choices" (the choice of topic of research itself, the choice of which theorical approach, the choice of the methodology used, the field studied, etc) and short of having reflexivity upon those factors, well you take the risk to be highly subjective, keep out of the realm of your research paradigms and thoughts that make you uncofortable so you don't question them, etc.
M.Weber had a similar notion "axiologic neutrality". The word neutrality imo is a poor choice. It gives the impression that with this tool, the researcher cease to be subjective and all others approach fail to it, and can be reduce to their researcher pov. Also might give the impression that by trying to neutralize any judgement in the research process, in order for this process to not be guided by those judgements rather than rational choices pertinent for the research, that the objects of research of the researcher cease to have moral or subjective values for others (and sometimes the researcher himself). It's not the case obviously.
All those items are just tools to make the social ground which is not an "objective" and physical one a more solid ground as far as method is concerned.