From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Nov 16 2003 - 07:05:20 GMT
Hi Matt,
>Matt:
>I think you are being a little ambiguous in your terms. I think its
>located in your assertion "morality demands respect, it IS respect" because
>I take you as thinking that the first half and the second half say the same
>thing, whereas I think of them as saying two very different things. I
>think Morality/Quality AS respect is perfectly fine. As you say,
>"low-Quality means low-Respect." However, if we take Quality and Morality
>to be synonymous with Reality, then the terms by themselves include both
>the low stuff and the high stuff. The point of respecting Morality, then,
>to me becomes pointless. It only becomes pointed when we take Morality to
>mean the high Quality stuff and Immorality to mean the low Quality stuff.
It's like saying we shouldn't respect such-and-such because we don't like
some aspects of it. If you accept morality AS respect, then, don't you need
to respect respect itself for it to have any meaning? It's like you need to
value value for value to have any meaning.
>Johnny said:
>What are your (your) feelings about determinism, free will, etc? I'd
>converse with David M but he seems not to be interested in discussing it
>anymore.
>
>Matt:
>Typically, I'm not much interested in discussing it either. As a good
>pragmatist, I think the debate moot. But here's how I think of it: when we
>look backwards at history, we tend to get the feeling of determinism
>because of all the research done in psychology and history. We can pin
>point why a person did something or what general conditions gave rise to a
>general social phenomena. But when we look forward, we are taken by
>feelings of free will because we are fairly uncertain what the future will
>bring until we get there. We look at all the weird twists our own personal
>lives have taken and we aren't so sure that we or anyone else coulda'
>predicted them, except in retrospect.
>
>But as far as the debate, I take James' stance: there isn't a difference
>between the two that makes a difference. If we somehow figured out that
>the whole world was deterministic, would that change any of the choices in
>our own lives? No.
You don;t think so? I think it would change our choices ito realize how
contingent and co-related all our choices are. We'd put more care into
them, and we'd also have a different attitude toward the choices of others.
People today think they don't affect other people because everyone has free
will, but they are wrong, what we do affects other people, we alter their
wills.
>Meaning doesn't disappear with free will and neither does morality.
Well, free will implies an arbitrary will, a random will, and a will that is
independent of morality - or else I don't understand how a free will makes
any decisions. I'd say morality does disappear with free will.
>The locus of morality isn't on some metaphysical notion of free will, but
>on the ego, the pragmatic differentiation between me and you. And if we
>found out somehow that Sartre was right, that we are horribly and radically
>free, that doesn't do anything either. We've always acted as if we were
>free, we've always acted as if we've had a choice. And if you haven't,
>then there's nothing metaphysical about it, just a pragmatic power play of
>taking control over your life away from your mom, or the rich, or the white
>man.
>
>Matt
Taking control away from mom, the rich, the white man, but giving control
over to the poor, your wife, other white men, etc. Not sure where you can
run to to be in control of your will, but you have to get away from pretty
much everything, and stay there. And if you have to stay in this island
vacuum to be in control, you're not at all in control, are you?
johnny
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