RE: computer pain
Jef Allbright writes: peterdjones wrote: Moral and natural laws. An investigation of natural laws, and, in parallel, a defence of ethical objectivism.The objectivity, to at least some extent, of science will be assumed; the sceptic may differ, but there is no convincing some people). snip As ethical objectivism is a work-in-progress there are many variants, and a considerable literature discussing which is the correct one. I agree with the thrust of this post and I think there are a few key concepts which can further clarify thinking on this subject: (1) Although moral assessment is inherently subjective--being relative to internal values--all rational agents share some values in common due to sharing a common evolutionary heritage or even more fundamentally, being subject to the same physical laws of the universe. That may be so, but we don't exactly have a lot of intelligent species to make the comparison. It is not difficult to imagine species with different evolutionary heritages which would have different ethics to our own, certainly in the details and probably in many of the core values. (2) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is good is what is assessed to promote the agent's values into the future. (3) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is better is what is assessed as good over increasing scope. (4) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is increasingly right or moral, is decision-making assessed as promoting increasingly shared values over increasing scope of agents and interactions. From the foregoing it can be seen that while there can be no objective morality, nor any absolute morality, it is reasonable to expect increasing agreement on the relative morality of actions within an expanding context. Further, similar to the entropic arrow of time, we can conceive of an arrow of morality corresponding to the ratcheting forward of an increasingly broad context of shared values (survivors of coevolutionary competition) promoted via awareness of increasingly effective principles of interaction (scientific knowledge of what works, extracted from regularities in the environment.) What if the ratcheting forward of shared values is at odds with evolutionary expediency, i.e. there is some unethical policy that improves the fitness of the species? To avoid such a dilemna you would have define as ethical everything improves the fitness of the species, and I'm not sure you want to do that. Further, from this theory of metaethics we can derive a practical system of social decision-making based on (1) increasing fine-grained knowledge of shared values, and (2) application of increasingly effective principles, selected with regard to models of probable outcomes in a Rawlsian mode of broad rather than narrow self-interest. This is really quite a good proposal for building better societies, and one that I would go along with, but meta-ethical problems arise if someone simply rejects that shared values are important (eg. believes that the values of the strong outweigh those of the weak), and ethical problems arise when it is time to decide what exactly these shared values are and how they should best be promoted. You know this of course, and it is what makes ethics and aesthetics different to the natural sciences. I apologize for the extremely terse and sparse nature of this outline, but I wanted to contribute these keystones despite lacking the time to provide expanded background, examples, justifications, or clarifications. I hope that these seeds of thought may contribute to a flourishing garden both on and offlist. - Jef Stathis Papaioannou _ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Evil ? (was: Hypostases (was: Natural Order Belief)
Le 20-déc.-06, à 19:06, Brent Meeker a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 19-déc.-06, à 21:32, Brent Meeker a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: I know it seems a little bit paradoxical, but then it is my methodology to take seriously the interview of the lobian machine, which is famous for its many paradoxical thoughts. It is certainly not a reductio against comp, given that we are not arriving at a genuine contradiction. It just happens that goodness is as unnameable as truth. Now, concerning this paradox, it seems to me intuitively comprehensible. If someone saves me from some horrible pain, then that is (arguably) good; but if he does that in the *name* of good, I can understand that this naming depreciates its action. Even if personally I am still benefiting from that situation, the naming could make me uneasy, and who knows what will be done under that or any name. A little uneasiness about what someone might do in the future is hardly enough to transform a good act into a bad one. It seems you are saying that if the good samaritan claimed to have performed his kind act *for any reason whatsoever* it would become a bad act. That sounds like a reductio to me. Not at all. It becomes bad when he refers or justify his act in the *name* of any unnameable virtue. It's not clear what bad refers to in the above. It seems as though you are asserting an absolute standard of bad while claiming there can be no absolute standard of good. Not really. Someone acting in the name of truth, good etc. are bad. But someone acting in the name of bad are bad too. Note that I am considering an ideal situation, and I am lifting provable relations between ideal machines and the notion of truth by appeal to the platonist relastionship between truth and good (and beauty, ...). None of those sentences should be taken literally or what I am saying would be self-defeating. Moral things have to be understood by oneself or taught by examples ... Perhaps this is a place to invoke the second person point of view, which refers to intimate relations between a little number of individuals who can communicate and share first person point of view (but here too normative suggestions can destroy couples and families) in a non public way, and thus can say more without falling in the trap of making things normative. My personal judgment of good or bad would not be so clear cut. If someone does me an act of kindness I consider that good. If he refers it to some unameable virtue, e.g. he says he did it in the name of God or Capitalism, then I may consider it a little less good - but not bad. Locally. Of course I agree. Now with ideal machines there is a sense to say that even good things when made in the name of goods (or worse: imposed in the name of good) could lead to the bad, for those machines, in the long run. I do think that western religion have repeated that error, and this would explain why it is difficult to come back to the questioning which was at the roots of those religion. As animals, humans, like wolves, have developed efficient, but lobian-ethically-wrong recipe of life, of the kind the boss is right ... My approach of moral here is before all theoretical. The funny godel-lobian paradox here is that lobian morality is quasi self-defeating. Summed up and simplified, it like if the wise lobian machine told us Here is a good suggestion: never listen to any good suggestion. It is hard to define those unnanmeable virtue except that true is already one of those and good, just etc. are obvious derivative of true. But I must say that I am talking about some ideal case, and I can imagine context where nuance should be added. You can, for example, give a vaccine to a child. The child is unhappy about that because the vaccine has some distasteful taste or because he is afraid of needles, and you can make short your justification by saying it is for your own good. Here you don't act in the name of good, you just sum up a long explanation based on the idea that a disease is not good for your child. Well even here the complete explanation is better in the case the child has no idea of any relationship between the vaccine and the disease. But even the most complete possible explanation must end at some point with something that is explicitly or implicitly good. I totally agree with you. I think the basic biological rule has been that if Animal A eats Animal B, in *general* this is good for A and bad for B. At the level of species this is probably already false (most animals with predators needs their predators in the long run for reason of ecological equilibrium and/or natural eugenism). We would not be here in case drinking water would have been very painful. But I think we agree that this good, in the explanation, must be something the child accepts as a personal good. For human-goodness, sure. The question are human good is not a
Re: computer pain
Sorry to be so slow at responding here but life [domestic], the universe and everything else right now is competing savagely with this interesting discussion. [But one must always think positive; 'Bah, Humbug!' is not appropriate, even though the temptation is great some times :-] Stathis, I am not entirely convinced when you say: 'And the psychopath is right: no-one can actually fault him on a point of fact or a point of logic' That would only be right if we allowed that his [psychopathy is mostly a male affliction I believe] use of words is easily as reasonable as yours or mine. However, where the said psycho. is purporting to make authoritative statements about the world, it is not OK for him to purport that what he describes is unquestionably factual and his reasoning from the facts as he sees them is necessarily authoritative for anyone else. This is because, qua psychopath, he is not able to make the fullest possible free decisions about what makes people tick or even about what is reality for the rest of us. He is, in a sense, mortally wounded, and forever impaired; condemned always to make only 'logical' decisions. :-) The way I see it, roughly and readily, is that there are in fact certain statements/descriptions about the world and our place in it which are MUCH MORE REASONABLE than a whole lot of others. I think therefore that, even though you might be right from a 'purely logical' point of view when you say the following: 'In the *final* analysis, ethical beliefs are not a matter of fact or logic, and if it seems that they are then there is a hidden assumption somewhere' in fact, from the point of view of practical living and the necessities of survival, the correct approach is to assert what amounts to a set of practical axioms, including: * the mere fact of existence is the basis of value, that good and bad are expressed differently within - and between - different cultures and their sub-cultures but ultimately there is an objective, absolute basis for the concept of 'goodness', because in all normal circumstances it is better to exist than not to exist, * related to this and arising out of it is the realisation that all normal, healthy humans understand what is meant by both 'harm' and 'suffering', certainly those who have reached adulthood, * furthermore, insofar as it is clearly recognisable that continuing to exist as a human being requires access to and consumption of all manner of natural resources and human-made goods and services, it is in our interests to nurture and further the inclinations in ourselves and others to behave in ways supportive of cooperation for mutual and general benefit wherever this is reasonably possible, and certainly not to act destructively or disruptively unless it is clear that doing so will prevent a much greater harm from occurring. It ought to be clear to all reasonable persons not engaged in self deception that in this modern era each and everyone of us is dependent - always - on at least a thousand other people doing the right thing, or trying to anyway. Thus the idea of 'manly', rugged, individualism is a romantic nonsense unless it also incorporates a recognition of mutual interdependence and the need for real fairness in social dealings at every level. Unless compassion, democracy and ethics are recognised [along with scientific method] as fundamental prerequisites for OUR survival, policies and practices will pretty much inevitably become self-defeating and destructive, no matter how well-intentioned to start with. In the interest of brevity I add the following quasi-axioms. * the advent of scientific method on Earth between 400 and 500 years ago has irreversibly transformed the human species so that now we can reasonably assert that the human universe is always potentially infinite, so long as it exists and we believe it to be so * to be fully human requires taking responsibility for one's actions and this means consciously choosing to do things or accepting that one has made a choice even if one cannot remember consciously choosing * nobody knows the future, so all statements about the future are either guesswork or statements of desires. Furthermore our lack of knowledge of times to come is very deep, such that we have no truly reasonable basis for dismissing the right to survive of any persons on the planet - or other living species for that matter - unless it can be clearly shown that such killing or allowing to die, is necessary to prevent some far greater harm and the assertion of this is of course hampered precisely by our lack of knowledge of the future This feels incomplete but it needs to be sent. Regards Mark Peaty CDES [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/ Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Brent meeker writes: Stathis
Re: computer pain
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jef Allbright writes: peterdjones wrote: Moral and natural laws. An investigation of natural laws, and, in parallel, a defence of ethical objectivism.The objectivity, to at least some extent, of science will be assumed; the sceptic may differ, but there is no convincing some people). snip As ethical objectivism is a work-in-progress there are many variants, and a considerable literature discussing which is the correct one. I agree with the thrust of this post and I think there are a few key concepts which can further clarify thinking on this subject: (1) Although moral assessment is inherently subjective--being relative to internal values--all rational agents share some values in common due to sharing a common evolutionary heritage or even more fundamentally, being subject to the same physical laws of the universe. That may be so, but we don't exactly have a lot of intelligent species to make the comparison. It is not difficult to imagine species with different evolutionary heritages which would have different ethics to our own, certainly in the details and probably in many of the core values. Imagine? Don't you know any women? :-) (2) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is good is what is assessed to promote the agent's values into the future. (3) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is better is what is assessed as good over increasing scope. (4) From the point of view of any subjective agent, what is increasingly right or moral, is decision-making assessed as promoting increasingly shared values over increasing scope of agents and interactions. From the foregoing it can be seen that while there can be no objective morality, nor any absolute morality, it is reasonable to expect increasing agreement on the relative morality of actions within an expanding context. Further, similar to the entropic arrow of time, we can conceive of an arrow of morality corresponding to the ratcheting forward of an increasingly broad context of shared values (survivors of coevolutionary competition) promoted via awareness of increasingly effective principles of interaction (scientific knowledge of what works, extracted from regularities in the environment.) What if the ratcheting forward of shared values is at odds with evolutionary expediency, i.e. there is some unethical policy that improves the fitness of the species? To avoid such a dilemna you would have define as ethical everything improves the fitness of the species, and I'm not sure you want to do that. If your species doesn't define as unethical that which is contrary to continuation of the species, your species won't be around to long. Our problem is that cultural evolution has been so rapid compared to biological evolution that some of our hardwired values are not so good for continuation of our (and many other) species. I don't think ethics is a matter of definitions; that's like trying to fly by settling on a definition of airplane. But looking at the long run survival of the species might produce some good ethical rules; particularly if we could predict the future consequences clearly. Further, from this theory of metaethics we can derive a practical system of social decision-making based on (1) increasing fine-grained knowledge of shared values, and (2) application of increasingly effective principles, selected with regard to models of probable outcomes in a Rawlsian mode of broad rather than narrow self-interest. This is really quite a good proposal for building better societies, and one that I would go along with, but meta-ethical problems arise if someone simply rejects that shared values are important (eg. believes that the values of the strong outweigh those of the weak), Historically this problem has been dealt with by those who think shared values are important ganging up on those who don't. and ethical problems arise when it is time to decide what exactly these shared values are and how they should best be promoted. Aye, there's the rub. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
RE: computer pain
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Brent Meeker writes: Well said! I agree almost completely - I'm a little uncertain about (3) and (4) above and the meaning of scope. Together with the qualifications of Peter Jones regarding the lack of universal agreement on even the best supported theories of science, you have provided a good outline of the development of ethics in a way parallel with the scientific development of knowledge. There's a good paper on the relation facts and values by Oliver Curry which bears on many of the above points: http://human-nature.com/ep/downloads/ep04234247.pdf That is a well-written paper, particularly good on an explanation of the naturalistic fallacy, covering what we have been discussing in this thread (and the parallel thread on evil etc. with which it seems to have crossed over). Basically, the paper argues that Humes edict that you can't get is from ought is no impediment to a naturalistic explanation of ethics, and that incidentally Hume himself had a naturalistic explanation. Another statement of the naturalistic fallacy is that explanation is not the same as justification: that while Darwinian mechanisms may explain why we have certain ethical systems that does not constitute justification for those sytems. To this Curry counters: In case this is all rather abstract, let me re-state the point by way of an analogy. Suppose that instead of being about morality and why people find certain things morally good and bad, this article had been about sweetness, and why people find certain things sweet and certain things sour. The Humean-Darwinian would have argued that humans have an evolved digestive system that distinguishes between good and bad sources of nutrition and energy; and that the human 'sweet tooth' is an evolved preference for foods with high sugar-content over foods with low sugar-content. If one accepted this premise, it would make no sense to complain that evolution may have explained why humans find certain things sweet, but it cannot tell us whether these things are really sweet or not. It follows from the premises of the argument that there is no criterion of sweetness independent of human psychology, and hence this question cannot arise. That's fine if we stop at explanation at the descriptive level. But sweetness lacks the further dimension of ought: if I say sugar is sweet I am stating a fact about the relationship between sugar and my tastebuds, while if I say murder is bad I am not only stating a fact about how I feel about it, I am also making a profound claim about the world. In a sense, I think this latter claim or feeling is illusory and there is nothing to it beyond genes and upbringing, but I still have it, and moreover I can have such feelings in conflict with genes and upbringing. As G.E. Moore said (also quoted in the article), if I identify good with some natural object X, it is always possible to ask, is X good?, which means that good must essentially be something else, simple, indefinable, unanalysable object of thought, which only contingently coincides with natural objects or their properties. The same applies even if you include as natural object commands from God. I was preparing a response to related questions from Stathis in a separate post when I noticed that he had already done an excellent job of clarifying the issue here. I would add only the following: The fundamental importance of context cannot be overemphasized in discussions of Self, Free-will, Morality, etc., anywhere that the subjective and the objective are considered together. Like particle/wave duality, we can only get answers consistent with the context of our questions. * Many have attempted to bridge the gap between is and ought, but haven't fully grasped the futility of attempting to find the intersection of a point of view and its inverse. * Many have shaken their heads wisely and stated that is and ought are entirely disjoint, so nothing useful can be said about any supposed relations between the two. * Very few have realized the essential relativity of ALL our models of thought, that there is no privileged frame of reference for making objective distinctions between is and ought because we are inextricably part of the system we are trying to describe, and THAT is what grounds the subjective within the objective. There can be no absolute or objective basis for claims of moral value, because subjective assessment is intrinsic to the issue. But we, as effective agents within the context of an evolving environment, can *absolutely agree* that: * subjective assessments have objective consequences, which then feed back to influence future subjective assessments. * actions are assessed as good to the extent that they are perceived to promote into the future the present values of the (necessarily subjective) assessor. * actions are assessed as better to the extent that they are perceived to promote
RE: computer pain
Brent Meeker wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jef Allbright writes: snip Further, from this theory of metaethics we can derive a practical system of social decision-making based on (1) increasing fine-grained knowledge of shared values, and (2) application of increasingly effective principles, selected with regard to models of probable outcomes in a Rawlsian mode of broad rather than narrow self-interest. This is really quite a good proposal for building better societies, and one that I would go along with, but meta-ethical problems arise if someone simply rejects that shared values are important (eg. believes that the values of the strong outweigh those of the weak), Historically this problem has been dealt with by those who think shared values are important ganging up on those who don't. and ethical problems arise when it is time to decide what exactly these shared values are and how they should best be promoted. Aye, there's the rub. Because any decision-making is done within a limited context, but the consequences arise within a necessarily larger (future) context, we can never be sure of the exact consequences of our decisions. Therefore, we should strive for decision-making that is increasingly *right-in-principle*, given our best knowledge of the situation at the time. Higher-quality principles can be recognized by their greater scope of applicability and subtlety (more powerful but relatively fewer side-effects). With Sthathis' elucidation of the Natural Fallacy in a separate post, and Brent's comments here (more down-to-earth and easily readable, less abstract than my own would have been) I have very little to add. - Jef --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: computer pain
Jef Allbright wrote: Immediately upon hitting Send on the previous post, I noticed that I had failed to address a remaining point, below. Brent Meeker wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jef Allbright writes: snip Further, from this theory of metaethics we can derive a practical system of social decision-making based on (1) increasing fine-grained knowledge of shared values, and (2) application of increasingly effective principles, selected with regard to models of probable outcomes in a Rawlsian mode of broad rather than narrow self-interest. This is really quite a good proposal for building better societies, and one that I would go along with, but meta-ethical problems arise if someone simply rejects that shared values are important (eg. believes that the values of the strong outweigh those of the weak), Historically this problem has been dealt with by those who think shared values are important ganging up on those who don't. and ethical problems arise when it is time to decide what exactly these shared values are and how they should best be promoted. Aye, there's the rub. Because any decision-making is done within a limited context, but the consequences arise within a necessarily larger (future) context, we can never be sure of the exact consequences of our decisions. Therefore, we should strive for decision-making that is increasingly *right-in-principle*, given our best knowledge of the situation at the time. Higher-quality principles can be recognized by their greater scope of applicability and subtlety (more powerful but relatively fewer side-effects). It's an interesting question as to how we might best know our fine-grained human values across an entire population, given that we can hardly begin to express them ourselves, let alone their complex internal and external relationships and dependencies. There's also the question of sufficient motivation, since very few of us would want to spend a great deal of time answering (and later updating) questionnaires. The best (possibly) workable idea I have is to use story-telling. It might be done in the form of a game of collaborative story-telling where people would contribute short scenarios where the actions and interactions of the characters would encode systems of values. Then, software could analyze the text, extract significant features into a high-dimensional array of vectors, and from there, principle component analysis, clustering, rankings of association and similarity could be done mathematically via unsupervised software with the higher level information available for visualization. This idea needs more fleshing out and it might be possible to perform limited validation of the concept using the existing (and growing) corpus of fictional literature available in digital form. When people tell me, in defense of an omnibenevolent God, that this is the best of all possible worlds, I point out to them that in Hollywood movies, good always triumphs over evil...and these movies are widely recognized as unrealistic. Brent Meeker No good deed goes unpunished. --- Claire Booth Luce, U.S. Senator --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: computer pain
1Z wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jef Allbright writes: peterdjones wrote: Moral and natural laws. An investigation of natural laws, and, in parallel, a defence of ethical objectivism.The objectivity, to at least some extent, of science will be assumed; the sceptic may differ, but there is no convincing some people). snip As ethical objectivism is a work-in-progress there are many variants, and a considerable literature discussing which is the correct one. I agree with the thrust of this post and I think there are a few key concepts which can further clarify thinking on this subject: (1) Although moral assessment is inherently subjective--being relative to internal values--all rational agents share some values in common due to sharing a common evolutionary heritage or even more fundamentally, being subject to the same physical laws of the universe. That may be so, but we don't exactly have a lot of intelligent species to make the comparison. It is not difficult to imagine species with different evolutionary heritages which would have different ethics to our own, certainly in the details and probably in many of the core values. It isn't difficult to imagine humans with different mores to our own, particularly since the actual exist... the point is not that they might believe certain things to be ethical; the point is , what *is* actually ethical. If you try to change their ethics, you can only do it by appealing to their values. Their values are objective in the sense that they can be discovered. And some ethical systems will promote those values better or more broadly than others. But I don't see any basis for judging the values themselves as good or bad. You could weigh them according to how likely they are to propagate themselves - like Dawkins' evolution of memes, but I don't think that's what you mean. There is a difference between mores and morality just as their is between belief and truth. If everyone believes the Earth is flat one can sail around it and show that belief is false. If everyone believes miscegenation is immoral, how could that morality be shown to be wrong? Not by marrying a person of a different race. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: computer pain
I really should not, but here it goes: Brent, you seem to value the conventional ways given by the model used to formulate physical sciences and Euclidian geometry etc. over mental ways or ideational arguments. (There may be considerations to judge mixed marriages for good argumentation without waiting for physically observable damages.) Imagine (since Einstein introduced us to spacetime-curvatures already) that the Earth IS flat with the format-proviso that as you approach the rim it changes your straight-line progressing: the closer you get the more it changes (something like the big mass ujpon spacetime - mutatis mutandis). So as you close in to the rim, instead of falling off, you curved backwards and arrive (on a different route) at the point of starting. (No proper geometry have I devised for that so far), It would seem, that the Earth is spherical and yuou circumnavigatged it. Like Paul Churchland's tribe who formulated heat as a fluid changing colors according to its concentration (in ho book Consciousness).and not some ridi\culous vibrations as some human physicists believe. For the innocent bystander: I do not believe this Flat Earth theory. Merry Christmas John M On 12/22/06, Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1Z wrote: Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Jef Allbright writes: peterdjones wrote: Moral and natural laws. An investigation of natural laws, and, in parallel, a defence of ethical objectivism.The objectivity, to at least some extent, of science will be assumed; the sceptic may differ, but there is no convincing some people). snip As ethical objectivism is a work-in-progress there are many variants, and a considerable literature discussing which is the correct one. I agree with the thrust of this post and I think there are a few key concepts which can further clarify thinking on this subject: (1) Although moral assessment is inherently subjective--being relative to internal values--all rational agents share some values in common due to sharing a common evolutionary heritage or even more fundamentally, being subject to the same physical laws of the universe. That may be so, but we don't exactly have a lot of intelligent species to make the comparison. It is not difficult to imagine species with different evolutionary heritages which would have different ethics to our own, certainly in the details and probably in many of the core values. It isn't difficult to imagine humans with different mores to our own, particularly since the actual exist... the point is not that they might believe certain things to be ethical; the point is , what *is* actually ethical. If you try to change their ethics, you can only do it by appealing to their values. Their values are objective in the sense that they can be discovered. And some ethical systems will promote those values better or more broadly than others. But I don't see any basis for judging the values themselves as good or bad. You could weigh them according to how likely they are to propagate themselves - like Dawkins' evolution of memes, but I don't think that's what you mean. There is a difference between mores and morality just as their is between belief and truth. If everyone believes the Earth is flat one can sail around it and show that belief is false. If everyone believes miscegenation is immoral, how could that morality be shown to be wrong? Not by marrying a person of a different race. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: computer pain
John Mikes wrote: I really should not, but here it goes: Brent, you seem to value the conventional ways given by the model used to formulate physical sciences and Euclidian geometry etc. over mental ways or ideational arguments. All models are mental and ideational. That's why they are models. Can you explain what you mean by conventional and unconventional? (There may be considerations to judge mixed marriages for good argumentation without waiting for physically observable damages.) Imagine (since Einstein introduced us to spacetime-curvatures already) that the Earth IS flat with the format-proviso that as you approach the rim it changes your straight-line progressing: the closer you get the more it changes (something like the big mass ujpon spacetime - mutatis mutandis). So as you close in to the rim, instead of falling off, you curved backwards and arrive (on a different route) at the point of starting. (No proper geometry have I devised for that so far), It would seem, that the Earth is spherical and yuou circumnavigatged it. And this would be different from a spherical Earth how? Like Paul Churchland's tribe who formulated heat as a fluid changing colors according to its concentration (in ho book Consciousness).and not some ridi\culous vibrations as some human physicists believe. What's your point?...that any observation can be explained in more than one way and since we cannot apprehend reality itself we must remain agnostic and indifferent between a flat and spherical Earth? For the innocent bystander: I do not believe this Flat Earth theory. So why don't you believe it? Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
