Philosophy God, Nietzsche, and Morality

Certified_Heterosexual

The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
I mean, yeah, fair cop. I work on self-driving cars with the secret desire to destroy rural communities and economies and I masturbate to rural opioid death statistics. Not even going to deny it. But my dude, you're an unemployed English major who writes Star Wars fanfiction--the genetic dead end things is rather the pot calling the kettle black, isn't it?

[citation needed]
 
D

Deleted member 88

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Cities destroy the environment dude. And they require rural areas to function. Unless your planning on getting your water and crops from space.

Go to Mexico City or Mumbai or even a modern European city-its teeming masses of people held in one place to maximize tax revenue and corporate profits in return the proles get access to amenities that would be more inconvenient in rural areas.

If say outright teleportation or replicator technology existed cities would no longer be of any value except as centers of administration and even that can be delegated further.

As someone who has actually been to cities on vacation I can absolutely say I would do anything in my power to avoid living in one.

Their noisy, rude, and alien, artificial. Alienating and built on a complex network of infrastructure that can and will break down.

Trumpet your cities, but good luck being stuck in your apartment with no food or water and someone wanting to burn you outside alive while the elite have fled to their country estates.
 
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OliverCromwell

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Friendly Reminder from the Boot. There's a difference between civil debate and harassment, and posters who decide to obsessively stalk and troll a single user are engaging in the latter.
[citation needed]

Internet's forever dude
, people can see everything. If you've actually published a novel somewhere I'll freely admit to being wrong.

Cities destroy the environment dude. And they require rural areas to function. Unless your planning on getting your water and crops from space.

Go to Mexico City or Mumbai or even a modern European city-its teeming masses of people held in one place to maximize tax revenue and corporate profits in return the proles get access to amenities that would be more inconvenient in rural areas.

If say outright teleportation or replicator technology existed cities would no longer be of any value except as centers of administration and even that can be delegated further.

As someone who has actually been to cities on vacation I can absolutely say I would do anything in my power to avoid living in one.

Their noisy, rude, and alien, artificial. Alienating and built on a complex network of infrastructure that can and will break down.

Trumpet your cities, but good luck being stuck in your apartment with no food or water and someone wanting to burn you outside alive while the elite have fled to their country estates.

Yeah, and rural areas still frequently rely on pastorialists selling wool and the like too. How did that usually end up for the nomads?

Cities might well be terrible for people like you. I imagine that the onset of agriculture was terrible for most hunter-gatherers as well, if the reduced lifespans, lower food intake, and higher incidence of disease said anything. But the technological progress that brings about these social shifts can't be stopped. The next age will consume you just as this age consumed your ancestors. Maybe one day when someone develops teleporters the age after that will consume me just the same. But for now, I sincerely wish you good fortune in the time that is to come. You're probably going to need it.
 
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Deleted member 88

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Amazing you ignored my point.

Wow.

Wait for the next pandemic or collapse of infrastructure or WW3. Cities will be death zones. I hope you get out in time.

As they always are when civilization collapses.

You don’t worship progress, I was wrong, you worship the god of neoliberalism, money. And the market.

Truly it is a day when progressives sit at the feet of gigantic corporations and praise them for destroying the environment and rendering everyone an atomized cog in the machine of endless money making.

Because getting one up on those reactionary hicks is just so much more important than than the scientifically observed destruction of human happiness and health in the concrete jungle.
 

OliverCromwell

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Amazing you ignored my point.

Wow.

Wait for the next pandemic or collapse of infrastructure or WW3. Cities will be death zones. I hope you get out in time.

As they always are when civilization collapses.

You don’t worship progress, I was wrong, you worship the god of neoliberalism, money. And the market.

Truly it is a day when progressives sit at the feet of gigantic corporations and praise them for destroying the environment and rendering everyone an atomized cog in the machine of endless money making.

Because getting one up on those reactionary hicks is just so much more important than than the scientifically observed destruction of human happiness and health in the concrete jungle.
Shockingly, in the event that civilization collapses most people are quite likely to die, yes. That includes me, and it probably includes you as well, unless you're very confident in your chances of living a long and happy life without access to modern medical equipment, transportation, communications, and so forth. I imagine that out of all of us, the remaining hunter-gatherers in Africa who haven't adopted the vulnerable infrastructure of agriculture, let alone industry and the city, will fare the best of us. But unless that collapse comes--and I note that civilization has not collapsed in the last thousand years--how well they fare when the world ends means very little for how well they fare otherwise, does it?

Seeing as though I'm a socialist I certainly don't worship neoliberalism, lol. In fact, I don't worship anything--I'm one of the few actual mythical nihilistic bugmen that reactionaries try to paint all liberals and leftists as, hence why I get so thoroughly offended when people try to paint the rest of them with my brush. More accurately, I suppose you might call me a fatalist--I understand that technological development is inevitable, and that as a result any transformations of society that are driven by said technologies are likewise inevitable and cannot be prevented or reversed, and I am very grateful that it happens to be the case that the current transformation of society happens to be in favor of me and against my political enemies. If I traded my fortunate background for your unfortunate one, I imagine that my politics would have been very similar to yours and I would be just as angry and bitter, which is why I can't find it in me to hate you as much as I am opposed to most of what you stand for.

"Progress" isn't quite the right word for it, since as you keep noting progress has certain positive connotations that I freely accept aren't necessarily true. Technological growth is. No man truly has any power to stop it or change its course. If it happens to be the case that my lifestyle is compatible with the urbanized world this technological world is bringing about, and I am happy here? Well, then, that is true luck, and I am grateful for it. If it happens to be the case that the lifestyle of you and yours is not, and will inevitably die a slow and anguished death beneath its treads, then what is there that can be said? So long, I suppose. Thank god that it wasn't me.

Like you said--human difference and inequality exist, and cultures differ. What is good for me is quite possibly very bad for you. The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must--the cities will grow, and the countryside will wither. That is simply how the world works, and what sense is there in feeling either one way or the other about that?
 

Yinko

Well-known member
but it seems rather obvious to me that people ought to act according to their self-interest given that it's you know, their self-interest,

Should is meaningless. Unless you can actually do something to bridge the gap between what should happen and what does happen then it's all a waste of time. You're talking about idealizations that have less validity than divine virtues at that point. You have acknowledged that people are irrational, and then continue to couch all your ethical, political and social arguements on the assumption that they can be made rational enough of the time for things to work. Further ignoring the point that humans are less rational as groups than they are as individuals, and globalized society is the biggest group of all.
 

OliverCromwell

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Should is meaningless. Unless you can actually do something to bridge the gap between what should happen and what does happen then it's all a waste of time. You're talking about idealizations that have less validity than divine virtues at that point. You have acknowledged that people are irrational, and then continue to couch all your ethical, political and social arguements on the assumption that they can be made rational enough of the time for things to work. Further ignoring the point that humans are less rational as groups than they are as individuals, and globalized society is the biggest group of all.
I want thing.

I am mostly likely to get thing by doing X.

Therefore I ought to do X.

It's... pretty damn straightforward? By definition, people want to achieve their preferences. By definition, instrumental rationality means "acting in such a way that optimally allows you to achieve your preferences". Therefore, one ought to be instrumentally rational.

I'm not attempting to design a system of government here, lol. I'm providing an abstract justification for what morality is and why people ought to be moral withing making reference to god or saying that morality is totally arbitrary. That people are not, in fact, rational enough to always be moral has no bearing on its validity, much in the sense that religions that hold that no person can be perfectly moral can still assert that morality, you know, exists.
 

Yinko

Well-known member
I'm providing an abstract justification for what morality is and why people ought to be moral withing making reference to god or saying that morality is totally arbitrary.
This pre-supposes two things. First that people see enlightened self-interest as the best way to attain their goals, and second that their goals are not seen as anathema by society.

Much of the world does not, in fact, practice enlightened self-interest. Instead, most developing nations practice a kind of kinship based self-interest where the good of your kin-group directly props up your own good. Depending on the culture, friends may either be a rare commodity or exploitable tools. Even in the US, where friends are more often than not closer than kin, there is little trust to be found.

As for differing moralities, we come to the problem of toleration. Say someone kills an intruder in their home, some view this as intolerable and others as commendable. Who is to decide what is to be done? The majority? We already do that, and it is often unsatisfactory to people in the ideological wings. No matter what the position is, there will always be those who dissent to it. And if you have no general consensus for behavioral norms you have no society. If you wished to strip the behavioral norms down to their most fundamental constituents and rid yourself of all other proprieties, then you would still arrive at anarchy, as places which have done so have seen.

You don't need gods, you do need tradition. Nothing can be built without a sound foundation, which often does not merely mean tradition but also legitimacy and consistency of policy. In this case, tradition is key as it allows a basis for behavior to become complex and self-referential. This further causes a problem though, as there are certain structures that are functionally inherent in human social traditions that are absent from leftist ideology.
 
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OliverCromwell

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This pre-supposes two things. First that people see enlightened self-interest as the best way to attain their goals, and second that their goals are not seen as anathema by society.

Much of the world does not, in fact, practice enlightened self-interest. Instead, most developing nations practice a kind of kinship based self-interest where the good of your kin-group directly props up your own good. Depending on the culture, friends may either be a rare commodity or exploitable tools. Even in the US, where friends are more often than not closer than kin, there is little trust to be found.

As for differing moralities, we come to the problem of toleration. Say someone kills an intruder in their home, some view this as intolerable and others as commendable. Who is to decide what is to be done? The majority? We already do that, and it is often unsatisfactory to people in the ideological wings. No matter what the position is, there will always be those who dissent to it. And if you have no general consensus for behavioral norms you have no society. If you wished to strip the behavioral norms down to their most fundamental constituents and rid yourself of all other proprieties, then you would still arrive at anarchy, as places which have done so have seen.

You don't need gods, you do need tradition. Nothing can be built without a sound foundation, which often does not merely mean tradition but also legitimacy and consistency of policy. In this case, tradition is key as it allows a basis for behavior to become complex and self-referential. This further causes a problem though, as there are certain structures that are functionally inherent in human social traditions that are absent from leftist ideology.
...and? I disagree with the politics here, but they're also completely irrelevant to anything I previously said. An argument for contractarianism is not an argument that people ought to practice enlightened self-interest or that they ought to follow any one particular set of behavioral norms or another. It merely argues that "morals" can be defined as those conditions required for rational agents to cooperate with each other, and that as a result rational agents--which, again, in this definition are simply agents which are acting optimally to achieve whatever it is that they want, whether or not it's their own selfish desire or the good of their kin or producing as many paperclips as possible, which is obviously the desirable state for the agent in question--ought to act morally because being able to cooperate with other rational, moral agents will allow them to better achieve whatever goals it is that they have. What the nature of those goals ought to be, how to judge their quality, and whether some particular set of goals are conducive to the development of complex society are completely irrelevant--contractarianism aims to establish only a basis for morality, not for how all of society should be organized.
 

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