Doxa

fleetmouse wrote:

mdsimpson92 wrote:By the way. What is your metaethical position, fleetmouse? Subjectivist, realist, noncognitivist,relativist. Sorry if I am just throwing labels out. Nietzsche would have hated me , I am too systematic in my thought, i have to categorize things and people.

It's a good habit. I don't believe everything can or should be systematized but you do what you can.

Honestly? I don't know what I think about meta-ethics yet. Is it important to try to make fact-value distinctions there, and is it possible?

Just covered it in ethics class. The class generally push for moral realism but left open non-cognitivism as the alternative. The book we read basically accused relativism and subjectivism of being arbitrary and potentially contradictory.

On the case of it being possible. Well ethics is a form of normative knowledge, so it could be possible that there could be eternal ethical rules in the same sense that 2+2=4 is a normative truth that is eternal (unless you ask the quantum physics people, but that goes in a completely different direction). So it could possibly be known through reason. I personally lean towards virtue ethics (comes across to me as the most practical).

so then truth is the art of telling lies....?

I'm confused, TT!

met wrote:so then truth is the art of telling lies....?

I'm confused, TT!

No, no, my dear girl,

....the good Pomeranian Professor is simply struggling with the age old philo problem of expressing the eternal through the particular.

Hegel 101

URBILD wrote:

met wrote:so then truth is the art of telling lies....?

I'm confused, TT!

No, no, my dear girl,

....the good Pomeranian Professor is simply struggling with the age old philo problem of expressing the eternal through the particular.

Hegel 101

Perhaps, but using Hegel as a way to deal with confusion will only lead to greater confusion. It's freakin Hegel!! He and Hiedegger are masters of the art of obscuritism.( I really don't think badly of either of them, but boy are they hard to understand.)

mdsimpson92 wrote:

URBILD wrote:

met wrote:so then truth is the art of telling lies....?

I'm confused, TT!

No, no, my dear girl,

....the good Pomeranian Professor is simply struggling with the age old philo problem of expressing the eternal through the particular.

Hegel 101

Perhaps, but using Hegel as a way to deal with confusion will only lead to greater confusion. It's freakin Hegel!! He and Hiedegger are masters of the art of obscuritism.( I really don't think badly of either of them, but boy are they hard to understand.)

Kierkegaardian propaganda. Don't fall for it, young pup!

Lol

I will never fall to your essentialist corruption. As well all know. Hegel leads to Marx, Marx leads to Lenin, and Lenin leads to Stalin. Slippery Slope fallacy FTW.

mdsimpson92 wrote:

fleetmouse wrote:

mdsimpson92 wrote:By the way. What is your metaethical position, fleetmouse? Subjectivist, realist, noncognitivist,relativist. Sorry if I am just throwing labels out. Nietzsche would have hated me , I am too systematic in my thought, i have to categorize things and people.

It's a good habit. I don't believe everything can or should be systematized but you do what you can.

Honestly? I don't know what I think about meta-ethics yet. Is it important to try to make fact-value distinctions there, and is it possible?

Just covered it in ethics class. The class generally push for moral realism but left open non-cognitivism as the alternative. The book we read basically accused relativism and subjectivism of being arbitrary and potentially contradictory.

On the case of it being possible. Well ethics is a form of normative knowledge, so it could be possible that there could be eternal ethical rules in the same sense that 2+2=4 is a normative truth that is eternal (unless you ask the quantum physics people, but that goes in a completely different direction). So it could possibly be known through reason. I personally lean towards virtue ethics (comes across to me as the most practical).

Just to get us back on track.

I'm not sure if I'd say that 2 + 2 = 4 is normative.

Anyhow it seems to me that there's no clear line between ethics and meta-ethics. You're always thinking about ethics, if you understand what ethics means at all, from within an ethical system... maybe you can get beyond good and evil but you can never get beyond valuing this over that, or you'd lose the capacity to distinguish signal from noise. In that sense valuation is wired right into perception.

The starkest, dumbest example I can think of is Ray Comfort evaluating other religions by judging them against the Bible. Well, duh, yeah, I figure by that standard they don't add up to much. Great Metafilter thread on Ray here. Especially love this comment. (I was looking for an excuse to link to that)

fleetmouse wrote:I'm not sure if I'd say that 2 + 2 = 4 is normative.

Anyhow it seems to me that there's no clear line between ethics and meta-ethics. You're always thinking about ethics, if you understand what ethics means at all, from within an ethical system... maybe you can get beyond good and evil but you can never get beyond valuing this over that, or you'd lose the capacity to distinguish signal from noise. In that sense valuation is wired right into perception.

The starkest, dumbest example I can think of is Ray Comfort evaluating other religions by judging them against the Bible. Well, duh, yeah, I figure by that standard they don't add up to much. Great Metafilter thread on Ray here. Especially love this comment. (I was looking for an excuse to link to that)

Actually, mathmatics do oddly enough go under normative knowledge. We actually covered this in ethics. I know, kind of wierd.

Thats horrible. reminds me of a similar and less kind quote "never argue with an idiot, he will bring you down to his level and beat you with experience."

Isn't it anti-realist to call mathematics normative? Sure the discipline and practice are normative, but it's not like there are competing theories of addition where 2 + 2 = cats. I think I'm a mathematical realist. Probably because I don't know much about math.