34 replies to this topic

[Parody of Language]

I know. I guess my humor in my post didn't convey over the internet. The internet does that to a lot of my humor ;D

[Tzela Vieed]

PoL, I notice your top four are the same as my top four. Does that just mean we have a statistically unlikely agreement on certain questions, or do we have to fight to the death now?

[The Heretic]

Nah. Just a philosophy-styled face off. A deathmatch where you outphilosophize one another till one of you is decisively refuted.

[DaveT]

Parody of Language, on 31 May 2011 - 04:01 AM, said:

I know. I guess my humor in my post didn't convey over the internet. The internet does that to a lot of my humor ;D

I probably would have seen it had I known which philosophers you most admire.

[ephelotes]

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Aristotle (92%)
3. Plato (85%)
4. St. Augustine (68%)
5. David Hume (67%)
6. Cynics (66%)
7. Nietzsche (64%)
8. Ayn Rand (63%)
9. John Stuart Mill (62%)
10. Epicureans (55%)
11. Jeremy Bentham (52%)
12. Thomas Hobbes (50%)
13. Stoics (48%)
14. Spinoza (47%)
15. Ockham (43%)
16. Nel Noddings (42%)
17. Jean-Paul Sartre (40%)
18. Kant (29%)
19. Prescriptivism (20%)

Not surprising, since I read Aristotle and neo-Aristotelians all the time.

[Parody of Language]

Well, the only thing I remember from Hume's ethics is that he felt that moral judgment should be made by a third-person observer. I guess I used to think about that point a lot, now the notion seems completely absurd. The third-person observer doesn't have a stake in the scenario, and therefore doesn't have the right to an opinion. But it is true that society pretty much agrees with this to an absurd level these days. Spectators are seen as the judge of everything; and so all of our activities in public are reduced to being performances.

[The Heretic]

Doesn't sound anything remotely similar to Hume's stance on morality, PoL.

ETA: What I remember is Hume's argument against the rationalist view of morality in which one judges the goodness/badness of an act according to eternal moral values. Hume used an exame of a young tree growing out of its parent tree and kills it. Since morality is about eternal moral values, then the young tree is immoral. Since that's absurd, then the rationalist view of moraltiy needs revising. He also points out that there are no empirical facts in morality. No matter what moral action we examine, we will not find the "vice". No morals may be deduced from empirical facts. Thus moral approval is based on sentiment, or emotional response.

Edited by The Heretic, 03 June 2011 - 01:39 PM.

[BDS]

Some of the questions seem ambiguously worded. For example: 10. LIBERTY Would it be ideal to maximize pleasure for all people even at the cost of liberty for some? Does this mean, "Would it be ideal to maximize pleasure for people in general even at the cost of liberty for some?" If so, it means something completely different from "....all people....". The way the question is worded, it means (or, at least, included in the meaning is): "Would slavery be ideal if the quality of being a slave maximized the slave's pleasure, and everyone else's pleasure as well." I answered the question as if this was its meaning (the way the question is worded, that is the meaning, but I'm not sure if that's what the question is meant to suggest).

[Parody of Language]

Hmm, Heretic, I did some searching online and I think I may have been thinking of what Hume called the common point of view. From the SEP:

"The subjective description view, by contrast, says that for Hume moral evaluations describe the feelings of the spectator, or the feelings a spectator would have were she to contemplate the trait or action from the common point of view. Often grouped with the latter view is the third, dispositional interpretation, which understands moral evaluations as factual judgments to the effect that the evaluated trait or action is so constituted as to cause feelings of approval or disapproval in a (suitably characterized) spectator (Mackie, in one of his proposals). On the dispositional view, in saying some trait is good we attribute to the trait the dispositional property of being such as to elicit approval."

I think the idea is that we shouldn't judge that stealing is bad by asking the person who was stolen from, because that person only has a relational opinion of the thief. Similarly, it is like asking a person's ex what that person thinks of that person's character. So, in order to make a non-relational evaluation, we appeal to the common point of view, which I guess is a spectator.

On the other hand, if one of us, from the common point of view, were to witness someone stealing from another person, like a purse snatcher; more than likely, we will say it is wrong only because we were taught that stealing another person's property is wrong (and we have this concept of personal property which is wedded to morality). But beyond this, if we were to try to explain why it is that we should teach people that purse snatching is wrong, we would have to resort to the victim's point of view. It seems to me that the common point of view depends on the relational point of view, in the end.

[DeadCanDance]

1. Aquinas (100%)
2. Spinoza (83%)
3. Kant (82%)
4. Jeremy Bentham (81%)
5. Aristotle (75%)
6. John Stuart Mill (71%)
7. Stoics (67%)
8. St. Augustine (63%)
9. Plato (56%)
10. Ayn Rand (52%)
11. Ockham (52%)
12. Prescriptivism (51%)
13. Cynics (48%)
14. Epicureans (48%)
15. Jean-Paul Sartre (48%)
16. Nietzsche (48%)
17. David Hume (45%)
18. Nel Noddings (35%)
19. Thomas Hobbes (25%)