quote:

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And why aren't you two ever in the same room together????

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Because one of them is on "The Fifth Level" while the other is in "The Barricades of Heaven."

Your not payin' attention are you.

We we're both together earlier.

Did someone wanna talk to me?

How come you guys are so freindly to all the other putzes, and so downright hostile towards me?

Yeah, someone answer the man.

I'd like to know, too.

So.

The judgment is made.

I return to hell.

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Originally posted by burning man:
How come you guys are so freindly to all the other putzes, and so downright hostile towards me?

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No hostility intended, burning man. Just kidding around.

Hope that banishment is reversible...

Can I do my thing, my way?

quote:

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Originally posted by burning man:
Can I do my thing, my way?

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Who are you, Frank Sinatra?

As long as you play well with others, have at it. And say "hi" to 668 it while you're at it...

I haven't read it yet, but I have to note this recent release from one of my favorite philosophers, Harry Frankfurt: On Bullshit. A link to Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691122946/qid=1107489595/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-4502087-9316957?v=glance&s=books


It's likely an expansion on a paper of the same name, reprinted in a collection of his papers called The Importance of What We Care About. Here's a bit from the publicity for the new book:

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, "we have no theory."
Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.

Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

Brilliant.

And who decides what is bulshit and what is truth.

You, phil?

The rather dubiuosly named Mr.Frankfurt?

Who decides what playing nice is?

You, phil, or those other arbiters of good taste sitting in the ivory tower of control.

I wish I had control, espescially self-control.

(Oops, I better stop. That's starting to smell like bullshit.)

I can't wait to get feedback on this reply, so I can see whether my response is acceptable to the ruling elite.

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Originally posted by storm_chaser:
Who decides what playing nice is?

You, phil, or those other arbiters of good taste sitting in the ivory tower of control.

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Answer: both myself and the other arbiter of good taste. Why? Because of arbitrary fiat from the powers that be who control this website. As official Moderators, we try to be moderate. But we also respond when the members of this community react to a specific post or series of posts with discomfort or displeasure. It's democratic in that way.

The nice thing about this "world" is the fact that, if you don't like what the arbiters of taste say to you, you're free to leave. We're not a dictatorship...in fact, it's rare that we ever receive so many complaints from other users that we are forced to step in (usually over spamming) and intervene.

If you honestly think I'm being hostile towards you, then PM me and we can talk about it. My comments on the burning_man/storm_chaser synergy were intended as jokes, but you seem to have taken them as more.

You're welcome to do things "your way" provided you (and everyone else on the Forums) follow the rules as posted at the top of of page. As far as I can tell, storm_chaser and burning_man 2.0 have been doing so and have been contributing a lot to the discussion here.

I love you guys.

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Originally posted by keylimetrev:
Has anyone here read a book by Robert Wright called The Moral Animal? Not exactly philosophy, but was recommended to me by a Biology grad student who was transfering over to study the 'biology of ethics.' The Moral Animal is supposed to be a decent overview of evolutionary psychology, but I've got so many books lined up I'd like to know if it is worth pushing to the top of my reading pile.

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I own it... it's not bad...

quote:

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Originally posted by keylimetrev:
Has anyone here read a book by Robert Wright called The Moral Animal? Not exactly philosophy, but was recommended to me by a Biology grad student who was transfering over to study the 'biology of ethics.' The Moral Animal is supposed to be a decent overview of evolutionary psychology, but I've got so many books lined up I'd like to know if it is worth pushing to the top of my reading pile.

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I can't say i've READ it, but I own and have glanced at it. There's a lot of stuff going on now at the intersection of ethics and the natural and human sciences. For most of the 20th century, ethics avoided sincere connection with either of these sciences and operated on its own, for better or worse. Now, there a ton of people with backgrounds in biology, economics, and psychology doing ethics work. People like Shaun Nichols, Steven Stich, John Doris, and Joshua Knobe are contributing to this literature...Doris' (who is one of my advisors and colleagues) book Lack of Character is a nice interface of moral psychology/moral philosophy and experimental psychology, focusing on some of the big experiments in the recent past (the Stanford Prison case and the Milgram obedience experiment) and exploring how they impact our notions of morality and character.

This may end up being a silly comment/question seeing as I have almost no knowledge of what constitutes 'cutting edge' in ethics, but I am interested to see if things like genetic dispositions and other biological discoveries are made. I'm curious to see if those working in ethics and morality will need to make some quick decisions as to how personal responsibility for actions changes as new info comes out.

pE- you're the expert here, are these kinds of questions already being adressed? Are they being ignored? Are they at all worth pursuing?

If I am reading you correctly, you are intimating that there are other factors besides free will, and social conditioning that determine a persons responsibility for his actions.

Since the inner force is represented by free will, and any outside factors are represented by social conditioning, I wonder where this other influence might manifest itself from.

quote:

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Originally posted by storm_chaser:
If I am reading you correctly, you are intimating that there are other factors besides free will, and social conditioning that determine a persons responsibility for his actions.

Since the inner force is represented by free will, and any outside factors are represented by social conditioning, I wonder where this other influence might manifest itself from.

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The third option, if it is an option, would be something like genetic predisposition or causal determinism, as keylimetrev points out. There are many who think that a condition like psychopathy is outside of the reach of both free will and social conditioning. I'm not saying that I beleive it OVERRIDES free will or social conditioning, but it's on the table.

To answer your question, keylimetrev, I think that Dennett's book touches on those issues from a non-ethics perspective. Mark Ravizza and John Martin Fischer have a book on responsibility that tackles them. I think LESS has been done on empirical-biological science approaches to ethics (that don't have an Aristotelian teleology to them...see Phillipa Foot's Natural Goodness) than should be done. Alan Gibbard is doing it, sort of, but it's a worthwhile endeavor. It's also a place someone with good cross-disciplinary skills could make a name for themselves...

I hope that as better cognitive and biological models are developed it will force some of the less "science friendly" areas of philosophy to get a little...friendlier. While I think that there is still lots of room for purely rational philosophy, it seems that the continuing scientific understanding of the world cannot be ignored.

To me, phenomenology may be most guilty of this, at least the classic phenomenologists I have read. While I thought Merlou-Ponty mde some great insights into how we interact with the world and other people as we see and observe it, I worry about accepting any 'general theory' that would be based on phenomenological observation, as I think there is way too much that we have no chance of perceiving. To drag this post on just a bit more, I also think John Searle has done a lot of harm to philosophy's embrace of science. His biological naturalism must be infuriating to anyone in the hard sciences when he makes comments that suggest that while everything is 100% biological...there is also something else which can't be captured in computer models. I get the feeling that he knows that in the end it is all science is going to win all the major battles, but is unwilling to give up the Cartesian bias that I find absolutely irrelivent at this point in time.

Hope that wasn't too unreadable.

I would have thought that the thrust of phenomomology is the interaction between stimulii, and the processing equiptment.

If we take for granted that the stimulii is consatnt at any given point, then I would think that the most important facet of the process is the capability of the processing equiptment to interpret the stimulii "accurately".

Now it gets messy.

We now move into the area of infinite regression.