Hypothetical- A War Crimes Tribunal (RAR)

[Formless]

Its been a while since I read up on Kant's epistemology, but if I remember correctly, I found his insistence that there must be a priori truths that need be meaningfully explored to get to the TRUTH of things to be so much linguistic hand wringing and reification (unfalsifiable to boot like most metaphysics), his apparent conclusion that there are tiers of reality an unnecessary abstraction, and his various arguments against empiricism being the ultimate source of all our data just ticked me the hell off. It all struck me as a very complicated way to say absolutely nothing profound and maybe even a little bit non-parsimonious. But I admit it has been a while, and I simply gave up trying in vain to reconcile it with modern epistemological concepts like falsification. His ethics don't have to stem from his epistemology, but without his a priori ideals and metaphysics, more practical oriented and less metaphysical ethics become much more attractive. Some of them are even deontological, like Rights!

I should stress that this is all my opinion. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

[eyl]

I would agree with almost everything Formless except that the Nazi Government was a legal one which is why Germany paid restitution instead of just saying "illegal, so why should we care?". But that should not hold any meaning on the debate, just because something is done by a Government does not make it automatically less criminal.

Since we've brought up WWII, it occurs to me that by the ethical code Carinthium seems to support, people like Raoul Wallenberg or Chiune Sugihara (not to mention any actual Germans who helped Jews escape the Holocaust) would be contemptible criminals.

Imagine a hypothetical America, variant-America. In Variant-America, racism is far more ubiquitous despite the fact that the Constitution actually implicitly bans slavery. However, whenever anybody attempts to challenge the law banning slavery lawyers refuse to take the case, and resign if necesary to avoid it! Therefore slavery continues.

If racism is so ubiquitious, it folloes that some lawyers will be pro-slavery and can thus be tapped to defend it in court.

Not to mention that a court challenge is not the only way to change a law - you can also appeal to (or run for) the relevant legislature.

Implicit assumption- Ethics must be practical.

I dispute this assumption, therefore you don't have a case.

If ehtics are not practical, then what's the point of the discussion?

Think about this logically! The Prime Minister's principles say that although genocide is bad, breaking a Constitution is even worse. Therefore, he does not break a Constitution in order to stop a genocide. Entirely logical!

Logical and quite abhorrent.

Have you ever seen a Premier try to act when most of his own Cabinet opposes him? He pretty much can't!

Then it behooves him to resign.

From a utiltiarian perspective, arming the minorities would not ease their pain. Participating in the genocide would.

Let me get this straight. It's better to let the minorities be painlessly (let's assume) killed rather than arm them so they can avoid being killed?

It is TOO MUCH to ask of a person that they remain good people under death threats! You CANNOT oblige that sort of thing! Only a small minority can pull it off.

Remember, this guy is a conscript. He never got a choice about going to war!

Then this guy got shafted. Nevertheless, it seems he went above and beyond in enabling the genocide, not to mention that he could have tried to defect.

F clearly would not feel guilty, though. Can we at least agree on that? If he did, he would not have done so well.

Why shouldn't he feel guilty?

NO IT ISN'T. The oath is to UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION, retard!

Why do people in the United States think judicial review exists? Because the judges say so! That is NOT A VALID ARGUMENT!

The judge could in theory have made a precedent, but if he did he would be failing to do his job. His job is to UPHOLD THE LAW.

I'm quoting this part out of order because I want to address your system of government in a bit more detail.

As far as I can make out, you espouse a system where laws are completely unambiguous, such that for every action you can determine in advance whether it's legal or not. This runs into several problems:

Complexity - such a system, as mentioned before, will require an extremely complex and detailed set of laws in order to address all situations. These laws will be beyond the knowledge of most of the populace. You have suggested replacing Civics with Law in schoold and making lawyers available to inform the public, but that will hardly be sufficient (besides assuming that you can do away with Civics) - you're talking about an extremely complex set of laws which everyone needs to know in their entirety for the ssytem to work.

Assuming such a system, what's the need for a Supreme Court in the first place? If the law clearly specifies whether an action is legal or illegal with no ambiguity possible, the courts' only function is to determine facts (i.e. not "are these actions a crime", but "did this man commit these actions"). In such a system, Supreme Court rulings are completely pointless.

Of course, this gets into another problem, which is that such a system can't function. Besides the knowledge issues I mentioned above, laws, being written by human beings, inherently have a chance of imperfection, i.e. ambiguity or outright error (for the sake of argument, I'm assuming that the political process, interest group pressure, personal corruption, etc may result in laws which are knowingly or deliberately suboptimal, which is also something you need to deal with). Besides that, the more complex the system (Especially since you're dealing with a confederation with multiple layers of sovereignity, which makes things even worse), the larger the chance that two or more laws, optimal in themselves, will conflict in suboptimal ways. The function of judicial review is to solve these issues. Your system can't do that, without action by the legislature, which tends to be a slower and often less responsive process, especially given the distributed setup of the coutnry in your example.

You seem to want a legal system functioning like computer code - at each step, what you need to do is clear. However, when a computer encounters something for which its programming is imperfect, it tends to hange or crash. Giving that a societal crash is undesirable, to say the least, we have courts to, in this analogy, issue emergency patches, with the elgislature for more comprehensive revisions.

[Carinthium]

So death is freedom now. Gotcha, Orwell.

Oh, that's right. Libertarians are one of the lowest forms of life in the political ecosystem. They never take the possibility of disasters into account, and yet expect the fire department to come save their house when its their lives and property on the line. When they insist that taxes are a burden on their FREEDUHMS, and can't come up with enough money to keep the streetlights on at night, they just shrug. My sister goes to college down in Colorado Springs, where that is quite literally the status quo. She doesn't leave campus very often, especially at night. What kind of freedom is that? Freedom for rich assholes who don't need it in the first place, that's what. They have their gated communities and their pensions and their easy white collar jobs, and half the time they are white men with no sense of how the rest of the human race struggles with real fucking problems.

I have witnessed Libertarianism up close, and I find it to be the position of lying selfish fuckwits who deliberately blind themselves to reality right up until the moment reality hits them in the face... and then go back to being blind again as soon as the trouble has passed.

This should set the tone for how I view your posts from now on. I'm not as generous to a fault as Simon_Jester is. And considering his view of you...

This is going to be fun.

Most of this is ad hominem. I should also note that you have never once demonstrated that we should care about results, or whether harm occurs to people.

Tell me, can you translate "freedom" into 5 east asian languages? How about 5 European ones? How about 5 African ones? How about 5 Native American languages? 5 Polyponesian languages? Can you manage 5 at all?

That's quite an extraordinary claim, mr. Hitlerjugend. Got extraordinary evidence? You could start with that linguistic challenge, just to show all human cultures even have a concept of freedom.

Americanitis: ethnocentrism lite.

I don't know enough languages for that, but I really don't have to.

Tell me, how many tribes consider it a moral wrong for an individual in a tribe to pack up, leave, and head to a new one, if they have committed no offence against the tribe? I'll give you an advance prediction: None.

Oh, but we might as well deal with the question of morality. Most people live in society. Most people want friends, business partners, a house, maybe a fuck buddy, maybe some kids. Maybe your brother hit you when you were a child, and you didn't like that so you appealed to mommy or daddy. And they separated the two of you and gave your brother a time out. And you kept playing with your brother-- you still liked him but you didn't want him to hit you. And you realized, hey, maybe I shouldn't hit him either. It doesn't make him happy.

And there it is. People want to be happy, and other people are key to that happiness. But other people want to be treated in certain ways because they too are seeking happiness. So they ask you to act like you give a damn. And maybe as you get older you realize that there are more specific things you want out of life. I mean, you only get one lifetime, and while eating potato chips while lounging on the couch may be nice once in a while its an unsatisfying way to spend your life. So you go out looking for a role to play in society. And it just keeps getting more nuanced from there.

Your explanation is Sam Harris level-retarded.

Your basic response here is contractualism. The problem with contractualism? First, that the social contract is different in different societies. Maristan's social contract, for example, is it's Constitution.

Second, sometimes it is in a person's self-interest to betray the group, or to use clever talking to move the contract in their favor in an 'unfair' way. You can bite the bullet on this, but I doubt you would.

What was that christian saying? Better to be a servant in heaven than a king in hell. Or maybe I'm flipping a quote from literature. Meh. I may be a recovering Catholic, but the idea still has its merits. I don't want to live as a selfish douchebag, and most people don't want to either. I want to be a scientist and do research for the betterment of mankind. What do you want to do with your life? Eat potato chips on the sofa till you get fat and die? Quite a pathetic life, but its your choice. Don't whine to me about taxes or whatever, and I'll live and let live.

This is Yudowskyite language, not contractualist. Taken in isolation, this section would point to the idea that we should attempt to encodify the human conception of "moral", take it to its logical conclusion, and go from there. Classic Yudowsky.

The problem with that is that is that you get intuitions. I'll elaborate later in this post.

I mean, like I said, Virtue Ethics dodges the pit of meta-analysis bullcrap by presenting itself as a sales pitch, and you are free not to buy.

The problem with virtue ethics is that it's a bad offer.

How about no. How about instead of concentrating on our instincts, which even if real date to a time before gardening, we focus instead on our needs as human beings and societies? Stone age man didn't have to deal with car accidents, gun control, scientific research ethics, the internet, anthropogenic climate change, war, genocide. But nevertheless, if you brought a stone age child to the modern age and raised him alongside all these things and with a modern education, he would look at you with the same slackjawed amazement at how dumb you sound every time you appeal to instinct as I do.

Let me go through my basic argument. We start with Hume and the Is-Ought distinction, which says that you cannot get from an Is to an Ought. This rules out many possible arguments for morality, such as Kant's categorical imperative.

By default, the result is a moral void. However, drawing on the work of Elizier Yudowksy, I use his argument that there is a human conception of what is good. If people inherently desire to be moral, they can follow that human conception of what goodness is and base ethics on that.

Your approach cannot fit into Elizier's metaethics, however. The idea that human needs should be fullfilled is one human idea about what is moral amongst many. It makes no sense to pick and choose amongst said instincts.

I know that this country is a fiction made up by you for the sake of argument, but a slippery slope is still as slick.

Do you at least concede that with Maristan in the state as I described it in the first post, this conclusion follows? And therefore that, in the scenario as written, the Karaks would be unwise to take your harsh approach?

Look at the actual evidence of the scenario and you'll see I'm right.

Holy bleeping leaps in logic, Batman! Also irrelevant to the question. Besides, I don't see how it could get worse than genocide and occupation by foreign powers.

Let's look at things from the perspective of post-war Maristan.

I'm going to make the assumption that the Karaks, having instutited a new government, pack up and leave rather than keeping the country under long term occupation, after having taken economic concessions for themselves. The reason is that any long-term occupation would turn into a Vietnam or Iraq anyway and would thus merely delay the inevitable.

The ordinary Maristanis are going to be massively resentful of the new system and the new Karak-imposed Constitution. The minorities will probably support it, but to the average Maristani it will be seen as Karakisation imposed by force. Having lost loved ones to the Karaks will reinforce this.

Not being Western in culture, Maristan does not have Western-style safeguards. We've seen that the army was willing to commit a coup and that Maristani politicans were willing to commit genocide. So why assume they have the same safeguards against dictatorship a western democracy does?

The course I would ultimately predict for Maristan would be what in our world is called a Banana Republic for a time, and that's if they're lucky. More likely, they would fall into a "standard" model dictatorship. Either way, racial tension would likely lead to a series of civil wars.

I don't call Saddam's Iraq civilised. Why should I call the resulting Maristan civilised/

What is so hard about "selfishness is bad when others are suffering on your watch" do you disagree with? Selfishness is one of the biggest single recurrent themes in your posts that you keep trying to draw attention away from. It isn't working on me. Sorry to deflate your balloon but it isn't.

Nobody has provided a satisfactory ethical argument for this claim about duties to others.

In my ethical system, duties come from a social-contract like idea- that you have implicitly promised to act in a certain way. But the PM, Premier, Supreme Court judge etc have promised to uphold the Constitution and nothing more.

Aristotle is sometimes considered an early (proto)scientist. He is also a philosopher, yes. Descarte was a christian apologist, who is remembered fondly because he stumbled on one tautological truth about reality (that is often misquoted). So did Philip K. Dick, and I think his definition of reality is among the best, but people remember him as a sci-fi writer. And as for Kant, fuck him. That shit bird is one of the most obtuse "thinkers" I have ever had the misfortune of being exposed to. His epistemology is almost anti-science (as I remember it), and his ethics stem from that... so I don't see what I should respect about him. My opinion. But sure, he was a philosopher. One who pretty much defined the stereotype of dudes in armchairs who sit around babbling about metaphysical nonsense.

We agree on Aristotle, so I won't go into that.

Descartes did massive amounts of work explaining why the problem of philosophical skepticism was a serious problem- he can't be considered a christian apologist because in Descarte's time and place no alternative to Christianity was taken seriously. Yes his solution to philosophical skepticism was mostly a cop-out, but showing the existence of a problem was progress when people before him were blind to it.

I'm not saying you should respect Kant. I'm saying you should call him a philosopher. He had a massive and intricately detailed system of ethics and of epistemology. What else can you call him, if not a philosopher? A bad one maybe, but still a philosopher.

Your challenge amounts to putting your fingers in your ears and saying "lalalalala, I can't hear you".

Quinean crap. I'm asking you to actually demonstrate the validity of the scientific method with regard to questions of ethics.

*Quite literally laughing right now* Do you really. So, if you don't mind me asking, what is your background in biology and genetics? This is not a rhetorical question.

Why not give an actual argument here, rather than rhethoric?

The problem here is that IF for any given moral claim it is merely cultural morality rather than genetic, how on earth am I supposed to call it part of the human moral code? The alternative is to abandon a Universial Morality alltogether.

Therefore ONLY those parts of morality founded in the human genetic code are tenable. The rest are bullshit.

You realize there was an unstated point in my previous post you are quoting. I selected those quotes to show a larger pattern of contradicting yourself every other paragraph or post. Now you aren't even trying. If your ethics boil down to "everything is human intuition" and then say "but human intuition is no factor if you have second thoughts", you have a fundamental contradiction in your ethics! Unless, of course, if you mean to say "I take my intuitions as sacrosanct, and will ignore everything you say if your intuition is to slap me across the face for being a genocide apologist", then it makes perfect sense.

You only see contradictions because you see implications I don't make, or don't see implications I do make.

In this case, I admit that there is a problem with human intuitions- some intuitions contradict each other. My system is a solution to this- encode ethics as Principles humans value and take them to their logical conclusions. Principles contradicted by several other principles, despite being intuitive, are dropped.

First, actually read what those philosophers wrote rather than what you imagine they wrote. Second, ever since Jeremy Bentham formalized Utilitarianism, this has not been seen as a good thing. Its not just philosophers either, psychologists have been trying to distance themselves from this approach almost since the science was founded. As a matter of epistemology, its easy to show how failed this approach is; people assume that others are too similar to themselves than they really are. In fact it even has a name-- the False-consensus effect. One human flaw is that honest self-examination is extremely difficult; in fact, that's one advantage to having human relationships. In some ways, other people really can know you better than you know yourself.

Not true- having read many more ethicist's works than you, I see most ethicists merely assume based on intuitions rather than appeal to empirical evidence.

It's not perfect, but it's up to the standards of professional ethicists, which is the best we've got.

Ohohohohohohoh. Okay, I bite. If you really are a student at said school, prove it. By all means, show for the forum some proof of enrollment for yourself. Oh yes, I am going there. You sound like you are boasting to impress people and the only thing you are impressing on me is that if you are telling the truth, your philosophy department is deeply flawed, especially your current instructor. I think you are now lying to sound more educated than you clearly are.

You think I'm going to violate my own privacy? Besides, such a proof would be ridicolously easy to fake- I could just show the uni details of somebody who wasn't me and claim it was.

And again, in two sentences you contradict yourself. You want a perfect system to "be the standard", but the system you have decided to be that system, you admit is contradictory. You are a man full of contradictions. And probably an F in logic class.

Resolved earlier.

Thanas:

Read the articles and the commentaries to them then.

Could you clarify this metaphor, please?

Bullshit.

Demonstrate your claim.

Last I checked, killing civilians has been a warcrime since the renaissance at least. It has also been codified as such in universal law ever since the 19th century.

It was a crime only on paper- it's not like anybody but a country's government could punish it. Yes in some sense it was a crime- but nobody had the sovereign right to punish it in any way.

In other words, you don't care if anyone can actually follow your moral code? Practicality ain't complicated, dude. But then its probably for the best that no one can actually follow your moral code, I will grant as much.

You seem to be making the Assertion fallacy here- making an assertion (practicality is good) without backing it up with evidence. Privledging the Hypothesis, effectively.

Then he is complicit in genocide, as the war was done explicitely to defend genocide. Very cut and dried. He is blind to the contradictions in his own behavior.

There is NO FUCKING CONTRADICTION! He followed his principles in the face of pressure, applying the law to the facts.

You can claim that they aren't. You have done nothing to demonstrate it. The whole point of using Virtue Ethics in this case is to demonstrate that people in such positions of power are NOT supposed to be ordinary. I already explained this.

All the studies on the Banality of Evil and similiar are on my side.

People in power are supposed to be fit to do their jobs under the Constitution. That's what these people have done!

Besides, an ordinary man in A's posistion would have backed down and committed the coup. A was a man of honour and principle.

Nice try, very nice try. But the Karaks justified their invasion based on the genocide taking place, and that is in fact a crime against humanity, so any selfishness on their part is outweighed by the severity of the crime they are stopping.

Do you concede that they were probably acting selfishly under the circumstances, however?

[Carinthium]

Since we've brought up WWII, it occurs to me that by the ethical code Carinthium seems to support, people like Raoul Wallenberg or Chiune Sugihara (not to mention any actual Germans who helped Jews escape the Holocaust) would be contemptible criminals.

Only if they have made a commitment, of their own free will, to obey or uphold the law. If they did, then yes you're right.

If racism is so ubiquitious, it folloes that some lawyers will be pro-slavery and can thus be tapped to defend it in court.

Not to mention that a court challenge is not the only way to change a law - you can also appeal to (or run for) the relevant legislature.

The people an injustice are done to are those CHALLENGING slavery, not it's defenders.

There is still a clear injustice here besides- if slavery actually is unconstitutional, than the Courts should deal with it!

If ehtics are not practical, then what's the point of the discussion?

To determine what is Right or Wrong morally.

Logical and quite abhorrent.

It shows the Prime Minister is not a coward, but a man of principle. Formless claimed he was a coward, which is ridicolous.

Then it behooves him to resign.

Why should he? He's not doing any harm by staying, and may be able to do some good on other issues.

Let me get this straight. It's better to let the minorities be painlessly (let's assume) killed rather than arm them so they can avoid being killed?

This is a war they can't win- they're going to die anyway.

Then this guy got shafted. Nevertheless, it seems he went above and beyond in enabling the genocide, not to mention that he could have tried to defect.

Defecting assumes D had brains above and beyond an ordinary person. If he didn't, his defection would be doomed to failure. Besides, either way he would be obliged to risk his life.

Have you ignored D's own case for why he did not go above and beyond? He was known for efficiency, and had little choice!

Why shouldn't he feel guilty?

Because he was only doing his damned job! It was his duty to do it! In addition, we should remember that his effective rhethoric in Court was all that swayed the judges into permitting genocide at all- hence he probably believed in what he was doing.

Complexity - such a system, as mentioned before, will require an extremely complex and detailed set of laws in order to address all situations. These laws will be beyond the knowledge of most of the populace. You have suggested replacing Civics with Law in schoold and making lawyers available to inform the public, but that will hardly be sufficient (besides assuming that you can do away with Civics) - you're talking about an extremely complex set of laws which everyone needs to know in their entirety for the ssytem to work.

At the very least, it can be the case that every person knows every law that applies to them personally.

Assuming such a system, what's the need for a Supreme Court in the first place? If the law clearly specifies whether an action is legal or illegal with no ambiguity possible, the courts' only function is to determine facts (i.e. not "are these actions a crime", but "did this man commit these actions"). In such a system, Supreme Court rulings are completely pointless.

Because some people are asinine and refuse to see the facts for what they are. The Supreme Court rulings would smack them down.

In addition, in some cases the selfish interests of the Executive or Legislature would make them want to misinterpret a law even if the ordinary person can see what the law really says. The Supreme Court would guard against this.

Of course, this gets into another problem, which is that such a system can't function. Besides the knowledge issues I mentioned above, laws, being written by human beings, inherently have a chance of imperfection, i.e. ambiguity or outright error (for the sake of argument, I'm assuming that the political process, interest group pressure, personal corruption, etc may result in laws which are knowingly or deliberately suboptimal, which is also something you need to deal with). Besides that, the more complex the system (Especially since you're dealing with a confederation with multiple layers of sovereignity, which makes things even worse), the larger the chance that two or more laws, optimal in themselves, will conflict in suboptimal ways. The function of judicial review is to solve these issues. Your system can't do that, without action by the legislature, which tends to be a slower and often less responsive process, especially given the distributed setup of the coutnry in your example.

You seem to want a legal system functioning like computer code - at each step, what you need to do is clear. However, when a computer encounters something for which its programming is imperfect, it tends to hange or crash. Giving that a societal crash is undesirable, to say the least, we have courts to, in this analogy, issue emergency patches, with the elgislature for more comprehensive revisions.

Another appeal to pragmatics. You have not demonstrated that pragmatics have a role in morality at all.

All laws which have ambiguity in them are unjust. Pragmatic arguments don't change this one whit.

[Thanas]

Its been a while since I read up on Kant's epistemology, but if I remember correctly, I found his insistence that there must be a priori truths that need be meaningfully explored to get to the TRUTH of things to be so much linguistic hand wringing and reification (unfalsifiable to boot like most metaphysics), his apparent conclusion that there are tiers of reality an unnecessary abstraction, and his various arguments against empiricism being the ultimate source of all our data just ticked me the hell off. It all struck me as a very complicated way to say absolutely nothing profound and maybe even a little bit non-parsimonious. But I admit it has been a while, and I simply gave up trying in vain to reconcile it with modern epistemological concepts like falsification. His ethics don't have to stem from his epistemology, but without his a priori ideals and metaphysics, more practical oriented and less metaphysical ethics become much more attractive. Some of them are even deontological, like Rights!

I should stress that this is all my opinion. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

But the only examples Kant mentions as truth - iirc, it has been a while for me as well - are those who are scientifically true as well. For example, he regards mathematical values to be true a priori.

[Thanas]

Since we've brought up WWII, it occurs to me that by the ethical code Carinthium seems to support, people like Raoul Wallenberg or Chiune Sugihara (not to mention any actual Germans who helped Jews escape the Holocaust) would be contemptible criminals.

Only if they have made a commitment, of their own free will, to obey or uphold the law. If they did, then yes you're right.

Any law, which sentences citizens of a nation to death with no trial and no crime having been committed is an illegal one.

Also, good luck for having decided to go full-out SS apologist, asshole.

[Formless]

But the only examples Kant mentions as truth - iirc, it has been a while for me as well - are those who are scientifically true as well. For example, he regards mathematical values to be true a priori.

Maybe so, but then what's the point of an epistemology that requires all truths to be double checked against the methods of another epistemology? And an empirical one at that. Science doesn't have to worry about something being absolutely true, like Kant seemed to require, as long as an idea is more true than a competing idea. And even then, science doesn't necessarily discard competing ideas, either (Newtonian dynamics). And of course, science frequently discards metaphysics as unnecessary and distracting, whereas Kant concludes Ideals to be "Transcendental" (that second tier reality I mentioned) as opposed to existing in the mind (a physical object).

As for math, I know he made a really big deal about it, just like the classical Greeks before him, but it always reminds me of a trick one of my teachers once showed me: that under certain circumstances 7 + 7 = 2. Don't get it? Look at a clock face. The definitions of mathematical terms themselves comes from linguistic training, even though the logic appears universal. Science uses math as a tool, but it isn't scientifically demonstrable like evolution or planetary motion. Which suggested to me that in practice, Hume was closer to the truth than Kant about empiricism being the source of all data, ideas included. Besides, I remember learning somewhere that it was demonstrated that math and logic are two different formal systems, and that there are theoretically an infinite number of others. Bertrand Russel et al, I think?

Its the sheer number of assumptions that underlie the philosophy of science that he contradicts or argues against that makes me think he's borderline anti-science (perhaps not intentionally). Certainly he would arouse skepticism if he lived today. And sure, I'll grant that science kept evolving after Kant and that ideas like Pragmaticism and Falsification didn't exist during his time. But the same can't be said of Occam's Razor, which Kan't doesn't seem to acknowledge or use. That's just dumb.

[Thanas]

I think you massively misunderstand what he writes. Kant is not writing against science, he is trying to apply science to metaphysics.

[Formless]

Hmm. Well, that's not how anyone ever explained it to me, nor how I've ever interpreted it. It was always accompanied by an attempt to define reality vs unreality, which implies it has the same goals as the philosophy of science. But if so... then frankly, I don't see the point of it. Like I said, metaphysics is a distraction from actual science in my opinion. For instance, a metaphysical study of time would have completely missed the connections Einstein made when he formulated Relativity; that motion and gravity can distort time, or that space and time are linked in an essential way. Or closer to my interest in the study of the mind, we have the very long held belief in the duality of body and mind... which we know from scientific study is false.

If you are right, well, he's simply in a category of philosophers who I think are/were wasting their time. At least as far as his epistemology is concerned.

[Thanas]

You may think so today but consider that philosophy was a more important subject than maths back then.

[Thanas]

Posts pertaining to other topic moved to other thread.

[Formless]

Yeah, but you can understand why I would be irritated to have that kind of theory presented as if it were somehow a competitor with empiricism if the two were supposed to have entirely different purposes. So... I guess we understand each other, Thanas?





Going to try and not repeat anything Eyl touched on. Mostly.

Why should the sovereignty of the international community, which does not exist for practical purposes over many states (the United States could flout international law and get away with it, if it came down to that), be any more valid than the Chinese Empire?

I repeat: what the fuck does this have to do with anything? sovereignty is not ethical in its own right. Hitler's regime claimed soverenty over all of Eastern Europe, but no one cried when he shot himself in the head as Russians marched through those countries to get at Berlin.

This is where we disagree. The pirate captain is attacking ships which are clearly not his by right- Hitler is dealing with Jews in his sovereign jurisdiction.

Poland was not under Hitler's sovereign jurisdiction until he conquered it, you fucking Nazi apologist.

Remember my analogy to a Soldier O who kills Jews because he feels it is his duty. Moral courage is based on standing up for your principles, NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE.

Right, you defend Adolf Eichmann. We get it. You're a Nazi sympathizer. You have no argument, only abhorrent opinions.

Possibly a wording mistake- I'm not sure. But what I meant to say is that he tried to negotiate, probably begun negotiations, but then had to call them off when war started. In each case he applied his principles logically to the facts.

Which brings us back to him being Blind to Facts: he had all the information in front of him that said "the Karaks are dead serious about stopping this genocide one way or another". He gave them causus belli. End of story.

Have you ever seen a Premier try to act when most of his own Cabinet opposes him? He pretty much can't!

Can't =! won't. AGAIN I have to say this. If he had loyal police, just as the Prime Minister had loyal Troops, he could simply arrest the cabinet for conspiracy to murder. Power to act is different from permission to act.

So you're saying that you should punish these people because it ultimately helps your happiness? Ultimately selfish, but that's not an argument- I'm merely stating it because it might make you uncomfortable even if it isn't a valid attack.

No, happiness is important to everybody, and you can't place your own happiness above others-- in fact, prioritizing it below others is sometimes a Virtue. Punishing those who cause harm is the utilitarian side of the argument-- but then, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics are the same philosophy with different foci. Utilitarianism focuses on how the external world effects the internal world of the mind, where actions are an external force-- it doesn't explain how we make decisions, it gives us a rule of thumb for making them instead. Virtue ethics focuses on how the internal world affects itself through the external world, including the internal worlds of other people. It gives us a method of changing ourselves so that we make better decisions, since humans aren't necessarily rational decision makers. We're emotive, we're biased, we have personality issues that need to be resolved. But it comes down to the same essential values-- happiness is good, suffering is bad.

Besides, from D's perspective it is illogical to die for happiness. Therefore, how has he commited a virtue-ethical wrogn?

Actually, this is a nuance you see in Virtue Ethics that isn't usually seen in Utilitarianism, due to its focus. It deals with more subtle emotions than just pain and pleasure, because those aren't the only emotions that must be dealt with to live a good life. For example, the desire to have a purpose in life-- not dealt with in pure Utilitarianism as normally formulated. The need to achieve Self Actualization-- not addressed in pure Utilitarianism. Desires to have achieved something meaningful in life-- not addressed. Its focus is on the external world, so it needs to simplify psychological constructs for practical purposes. In this case, the guy is stuck in a dilemma between dying with a clean conscience (i.e. not a murderer), and dying for doing the right thing. Either way he dies. But most ethical human beings would gladly choose the former-- including Utilitarians. Because they aren't selfish bastards.

By participating he eases pain, which is consistent with Benthamite utiltairanism. C's are the actions of a 100%-consistent Benthamite.

Bentham was after a practical ethos, but he would never accept that a painless death is good if it was avoidable, let alone 200,000 deaths. Death is never perfectly painless. You get dragged into the death camp against your will. Painful, psychologically and probably physically too, because the soldiers have to beat you up if you struggle. You have to hear the cries of the people around you before they get put into the gas chambers. Horrible experience. You have to watch in agony as children are separated from their parents... are you getting the picture, or have you never thought about the horrors of mass murder and Genocide? Plus, the families and friends of the deceased suffer too, dumbfuck, as you would know if you have ever attended a funeral. What about those who are in mixed race relationships? Or did the 200,000 casualty rare omit those who were killed for other things the Maristanis dissaprove of? Homosexuals, political dissidants, people the neighbors just didn't like? How about foreigners? Because guess what, any foreign nationals that died in this event would be more reason for other countries to go to war with the Maristanis, and no one would cry pity for the murdering cunts.

Idiot. Idiot Idiot Idiot Idiot IDIOT!

Besides the Tenth Amendment in the United States proving you wrong there, remember the fact that powers are divided between the Federal and State governments! Each have the RIGHT to do anything within their powers! If the Federal Government can stop the State BY FORCE from using it's powers then it is BREAKING THE CONSTITUTION!

Oh cry me a river, you pedantic whore. The text says this:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The states are the government. The government can do whatever isn't explicitly banned by the constitution. The Federal government of the US is restricted, but not the government in all its parts. And this is only relevant to the US, not to the larger universe you live in, such as Germany. You just suck at reading, and have a serious case of Americanitis.

And besides, my point is still the same as it was when you first responded to it. The Constitution of a country (or similar document) doesn't necessarily promote moral behavior, nor necessarily construct a functioning framework of government that won't collapse on itself.

Internet definitions contradict each other all the time. See Wikipedia on Vigilante.

Okay:

A vigilante (/ˌvɪdʒɪˈlænti/, /ˌvɪdʒɪˈlænteɪ/; Spanish: [bixiˈlante]; Portuguese: [viʒiˈlɐ̃t(ɨ)], [viʒiˈlɐ̃tʃi]) is a member of a self-appointed group that undertakes law enforcement without legal authority.[1]

You were saying?

Explain why the international community had any jurisdiction over the actions of Nazi Germany. They had WITHDRAWN from the League of Nations, and the League of Nations had not attempted to use force to stop them.

Because they have a duty to protect the lives of ALL human beings, not just those living in their borders. The US constitution is actually explicit about this. Plus, Germany had made it clear that among their top goals was conquest, and none of Europe was safe.

The UN replaced the Leage of Nations, and in 1948 they adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it clear (at least on paper) that the Right to Life, among others, cannot be redacted at will by any country.

[Carinthium]

I'll do Thanas first.

Any law, which sentences citizens of a nation to death with no trial and no crime having been committed is an illegal one.

This is where we disagree. Why should this kind of law be arbitrarily illegal?

[Carinthium]

I am constantly surprised that the fact both the PM and the Premier's governments were democratically elected and that overthrowing them means overthrowing the will of the people doesn't come into play here. Formless, do you or do you not believe that The People have a right to sovereignty?

To make things clear I don't, but it's a guess because that's a popular view on this site. If Formless believes that the people have a right to be sovereign he's clearly in trouble here.

I repeat: what the fuck does this have to do with anything? sovereignty is not ethical in its own right. Hitler's regime claimed soverenty over all of Eastern Europe, but no one cried when he shot himself in the head as Russians marched through those countries to get at Berlin.

Because if the international community has no sovereignty, then they are vigilantes. If they are vigilantes, they contradict themselves by upholding rule of law and yet trying to force a democratic government to commit a coup.

Hypothetically speaking, let me take a hypothetical version of the Karaks, Karaks-A, who I would consider more sympathetic.

Karaks-A wanted the genocide stopped at all costs but don't want to force the PM to break the Constitution. So they pour over the books of Maristani law hoping to find a technicality. In addition, they give the PM the offer that they declare war, destroy the death camps, then pull out again as a technicality and promise not to try anyone for war crimes if the PM agrees.

Karaks-A would be acting in a reasonable manner befitting the circumstances. I would still be reluctant to support them, but I would at least see where they were coming from.

Poland was not under Hitler's sovereign jurisdiction until he conquered it, you fucking Nazi apologist.

This comes into a debate over when a usurper turns into a sovereign. This is a pretty difficult ethical dilemna, but I can see a case for saying Hitler got it as soon as he conquered.

Right, you defend Adolf Eichmann. We get it. You're a Nazi sympathizer. You have no argument, only abhorrent opinions.

Eichmann's case was different. Soldier O, however, IS NOT A COWARD. He is STICKING TO HIS PRINCIPLES.

Which brings us back to him being Blind to Facts: he had all the information in front of him that said "the Karaks are dead serious about stopping this genocide one way or another". He gave them causus belli. End of story.

He was probably, being a Prime Minister, well aware the Karaks were dead serious about stopping the genocide. He took a stand on principle and decided that he didn't care.

Can't =! won't. AGAIN I have to say this. If he had loyal police, just as the Prime Minister had loyal Troops, he could simply arrest the cabinet for conspiracy to murder. Power to act is different from permission to act.

Just because the Army has a culture in which they would be willing to coup doesn't mean the police do. Even if they did, this would be treason on the Premier's part so I can see him refusing to do so on principle.

Why do you think the Police would probably be willing? They have a very different institutional culture.

No, happiness is important to everybody, and you can't place your own happiness above others-- in fact, prioritizing it below others is sometimes a Virtue. Punishing those who cause harm is the utilitarian side of the argument-- but then, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics are the same philosophy with different foci. Utilitarianism focuses on how the external world effects the internal world of the mind, where actions are an external force-- it doesn't explain how we make decisions, it gives us a rule of thumb for making them instead. Virtue ethics focuses on how the internal world affects itself through the external world, including the internal worlds of other people. It gives us a method of changing ourselves so that we make better decisions, since humans aren't necessarily rational decision makers. We're emotive, we're biased, we have personality issues that need to be resolved. But it comes down to the same essential values-- happiness is good, suffering is bad.

The ENTIRE REASON to embrace virtue ethics over selfishness is that it ultimately helps your happiness in the long run. Therefore, no virtue ethical action is rational except for that reason.

Also, to be clear I dispute the idea that you can just claim Happiness is Good or Suffering is Bad without a rational argument to back it up.

Actually, this is a nuance you see in Virtue Ethics that isn't usually seen in Utilitarianism, due to its focus. It deals with more subtle emotions than just pain and pleasure, because those aren't the only emotions that must be dealt with to live a good life. For example, the desire to have a purpose in life-- not dealt with in pure Utilitarianism as normally formulated. The need to achieve Self Actualization-- not addressed in pure Utilitarianism. Desires to have achieved something meaningful in life-- not addressed. Its focus is on the external world, so it needs to simplify psychological constructs for practical purposes. In this case, the guy is stuck in a dilemma between dying with a clean conscience (i.e. not a murderer), and dying for doing the right thing. Either way he dies. But most ethical human beings would gladly choose the former-- including Utilitarians. Because they aren't selfish bastards.

Without a rational argument for morality, why be anything but a selfish bastard?

Bentham was after a practical ethos, but he would never accept that a painless death is good if it was avoidable, let alone 200,000 deaths. Death is never perfectly painless. You get dragged into the death camp against your will. Painful, psychologically and probably physically too, because the soldiers have to beat you up if you struggle. You have to hear the cries of the people around you before they get put into the gas chambers. Horrible experience. You have to watch in agony as children are separated from their parents... are you getting the picture, or have you never thought about the horrors of mass murder and Genocide? Plus, the families and friends of the deceased suffer too, dumbfuck, as you would know if you have ever attended a funeral. What about those who are in mixed race relationships? Or did the 200,000 casualty rare omit those who were killed for other things the Maristanis dissaprove of? Homosexuals, political dissidants, people the neighbors just didn't like? How about foreigners? Because guess what, any foreign nationals that died in this event would be more reason for other countries to go to war with the Maristanis, and no one would cry pity for the murdering cunts.

Because the pain would happen anyway when they were defeated and killed. But other methods could easily be used. Say, for example, all the minorities were set on fire due to some pure sadist. C could realistically fear that would happen.

The states are the government. The government can do whatever isn't explicitly banned by the constitution. The Federal government of the US is restricted, but not the government in all its parts. And this is only relevant to the US, not to the larger universe you live in, such as Germany. You just suck at reading, and have a serious case of Americanitis.

You still have a problem. A Constitution can easily give a list of explicit powers on a Federal or State level and say that such is all the government is empowered to do.

In addition, even in the cases where you are right by that interpretation (which exist, even if they aren't as total as you think), the Legislature, not the Executive, usually is invested with such power.

You were saying?

I would have thought it was obvious! The Prime Minister does not have legal authority to stop the genocide- nor does the Premier have legal authority to arrest the Cabinet! If they do those things, they are vigilantes!

Because they have a duty to protect the lives of ALL human beings, not just those living in their borders. The US constitution is actually explicit about this. Plus, Germany had made it clear that among their top goals was conquest, and none of Europe was safe.

The UN replaced the Leage of Nations, and in 1948 they adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it clear (at least on paper) that the Right to Life, among others, cannot be redacted at will by any country.

The Chinese Emperor would believe it was his right to subdue all barbarians. The Soviets under Lenin believed it their duty to conquer the world for the proletariat. Do you claim both of them had such rights of intereference too?

[Thanas]

I'll do Thanas first.

Any law, which sentences citizens of a nation to death with no trial and no crime having been committed is an illegal one.

This is where we disagree. Why should this kind of law be arbitrarily illegal?

This should be self-evident. The state is created via social contract to serve and protect its citizens. This function is the sole legitimacy for it having extraordinary powers to infringe upon the liberties of said citizens. As soon as it violates this basic contract it loses all legitimacy to issue orders pertaining to those it violated.

[Carinthium]

And how many states are there, and have there been, around the world which have no reference to the social contract in their political philosophy or their Constitution? Imagine trying to argue that nonsense in, say, ancient Assyria? In medieval Europe you might have found sympathy, but what about the pagan states that took over Rome before they became Christian? What about the few Native American states worthy of the term 'empire'?

Trying to argue what you argue in cultures which have never even invented the concept of a social contract is retarded unless you can somehow demonstrate they believe in implicitly.

Let's imagine, hypothetically, speaking, the following scenario.

The people of Yargastan, having overthrown a dictator, get together and their democratically elected representatives create a social contract that is agreed to by a majority of 95% of the population, including practically all of the ethnic minority known as the Margas.

A bill then goes through the newly created Parliament, with support of 90% of the population, to exterminate all the Margas. The Margas did not see this coming (obviously they wouldn't agree to exterminate themselves), but their representatives ratified a Constitution, with the Margas supporting their decision at the time, which they now realise allowed that to happen.

--------------------------------

Can the Margas really withdraw their consent retrospectively just because there is a law they don't like? Thanas, you're a believer in popular sovereignty aren't you? Why are you making an arbitrary exception now when you don't have this kind of stance against the death penalty?

If anybody wants to claim the Margas didn't really consent, then can we say real consent ever exists?

[Thanas]

And how many states are there, and have there been, around the world which have no reference to the social contract in their political philosophy or their Constitution? Imagine trying to argue that nonsense in, say, ancient Assyria? In medieval Europe you might have found sympathy, but what about the pagan states that took over Rome before they became Christian? What about the few Native American states worthy of the term 'empire'?

None of these matter as the state we are talking about is a modern state.

And even in ancient states the state existed for the protection of its citizens. Certainly in Ancient Greek and Rome.
Under Roman imagination, the Emperor was supposed to provide for the citizens of Rome and that he did generously. He could easily have claimed to not do anything at all. After all, why should he bother to give away meat, olive oil, wine, grain etc? He did so because it was expected of him. That is at least an implicit social contract and I would argue that within the whole princeps ideology it is also an expressed one considering the Emperor's powers were granted to him via a law which stated for which purposes he had the right to use his powers. Likewise, the state had the duty to protect the Roman citizens from foreign aggression. No other state was permitted to execute a Roman and no Roman was allowed to hit another Roman. But all of that is immaterial to this discussion because we are talking about a modern democracy here.

The rest of your hypothetical scenario is irrelevant to this topic. All modern democracies work according to the social contract and the genocide state is not different from them.

[Carinthium]

O.K, so you're at least conceding that the social contract is not universial.

In that case, why not consider the possibility Maristan doesn't have a social contract with that implicit term? Things to note:
-Maristan's racism is worse than the 1960s South, implying that minorities aren't considered to participate in the social contract
-The original writers of the Constitution were totally okay with genocide occuring (VERY IMPORTANT!)
-The racism has been getting better over time, implying that when the Constitution was made it was even worse.

This is a contract of a sort, but more analagous to the ancient Roman social contract in that large parts of what we would call society are left out of it.

[Thanas]

O.K, so you're at least conceding that the social contract is not universial.[/quote

I do, but that should not matter at all since a) the societies where it did not exist are long before Greece and Rome and therefore immaterial to the discussion and b) every modern democracy has a social contract.

In that case, why not consider the possibility Maristan doesn't have a social contract with that implicit term? Things to note:
-Maristan's racism is worse than the 1960s South, implying that minorities aren't considered to participate in the social contract
-The original writers of the Constitution were totally okay with genocide occuring (VERY IMPORTANT!)
-The racism has been getting better over time, implying that when the Constitution was made it was even worse.

This is a contract of a sort, but more analagous to the ancient Roman social contract in that large parts of what we would call society are left out of it.

This is pure sophistry and nothing in the way of argument. They are subject of a modern state, which makes them a priori part of the social contract. Any other argument is null and void in the face of these simple truths.

Also, it strikes me that you are simply arguing for the sake of arguing at this point.

[Carinthium]

This is an area in which it isn't appropriate to speak in black and white. As a default assumption I would agree with you that IF and only IF a social contract exists then your rule is accurate. However, in this case there is reason to doubt it.

And ad hominem.

[Thanas]

This is an area in which it isn't appropriate to speak in black and white.

Funny. Suddenly you are all about shades of grey when previously you were the defenders of absolutes. Oh how quickly that goes out the window when you are in danger of not being able to weasel out of this one by claiming only absolutes matter losing.

As a default assumption I would agree with you that IF and only IF a social contract exists then your rule is accurate. However, in this case there is reason to doubt it.

No, there is not. Is your country a democracy? It is. Are there elections in which the governed as a whole give their consent? There are. Voila, social contract.

And ad hominem.

Look dude, whenever somebody spents several pages of asserting that only absolutes matter and then switches to "no no, relativity is absolutely fine" whenever that someone is in danger of losing that person is either dishonest, has no consistency/spine or is just arguing for the sake of arguing.

[Carinthium]

Like you, in some areas I believe in absolutes and in others I believe in shades of grey. In my case, this is because the term "absolute" or "shade of grey" is merely a metaphor at best and therefore does not accurately describe reality.

I'll start by demonstrating to you that it easily could be the case no social contract exists, then we'll go on to specifics.

Take one hypothetical route Maristan could easily have gone down compatible with the original scenario that would prove my point. Something like this:

-Originally, Maristan only extended the vote to ethnic Maristanis. The original Constitution permitted for the vote to be defined by Parliament (Aussie constitution does this) partly because what a Maristani was was disputed and partly because the Founding Fathers postulated a situation in which some ethnic groups were getting 'uppity' and concessions were needed to restore order, either temporary or permanent.

-However, despite this the Fathers had intended that such concessions be revoked later when Parliament saw fit. Maristan had been intended to be a state that served the interests of the Maristanis, who they assumed would inevitably stay in majority because they believed their descendants would be racist like them and ensure it.

All these facts are very plausible given the original scenario. If true, they would justify saying that no social contract existed with non-Maristanis.

[Esquire]

Carinthium, when you were a child, were you bitten by a rabid, misunderstood copy of Leviathan? Your entire... oh, let's go ahead and say 'ethical system' depends on the simultaneous assumptions that there is no moral authority higher than the State and that the State can never be wrong about anything, both of which are so blatantly untrue that defending them probably counts as some sort of mental illness.

Point first: The State cannot have a perfect perception of truth and goodness*, because then no new laws could ever be made without hypocrisy since to make a new law is to simultaneously say "We, the State, think this is a good idea," and "We didn't think of this before." That your imaginary country has a Parliament suggests that it admits to imperfections.

*Defined here however you like.

Point second: It is insane (clinically, even) to seriously insist that an imperfect system cannot be wrong. The idea that "Because the State says so" is necessarily a good reason for anything, logically or morally, is equivalent to saying that because the Bible says the Bible is literally true, the Bible must be literally true since the Bible says so.

Point third: The State is not the ultimate, faultless arbiter of truth and goodness,* either because it can be wrong, if truth and justice are objective; or because there are bigger sticks around, if might really does make right.

*Defined here however you like.

Point fourth: The social contract does not work the way you think it does. Its purpose is to prevent civil war, preserve the lives of its participants, and allow for a stable society. The mere fact that the question of genocide is coming up suggests that your example social contract has serious flaws and needs to be rewritten, because the State trying to kill you is something even Hobbes admits the citizen is free to resist. The decision to exterminate this substantial minority practically guarantees massive civil unrest and probably invasion by the country's less-evil neighbors, and has therefore been a net negative for the country.

Furthermore, the social contract necessarily exists between everyone under a particular government. This is the only reason the social contract works; the State offered it to whatever you were calling the minority with the vote, and they accepted by remaining citizens. The only exceptions I can think of would be conquered populations or those actively held down by legally-applied State force.

[Formless]

By the way, this is probably the last time I'm responding to this thread, even though there is much directed at me I could respond to. I hope it becomes clear why.

Okay, so let me see if I understand you. When you say "correct" you mean... what, exactly?

My category of correct is based not on the arguments themselves but on which argument 'beats' which argument. For example, if I claim "Hitler shouldn't kill Jews because the sky is green!" and you demonstrate the sky is Blue therefore Hitler should kill Jews, you win the argument because yours is more convincing within the argument's implied assumptions.

Basically, it comes down to whose argument is more convincing within those assumptions we both share.

This isn't a game, retard. Arguments don't "beat" other arguments. There are no victory conditions, no killer combos, no jackpots, no trap cards, no home runs, no counterspells, no calling check, no debuffs, no trump cards, no weak spots, no points you can score. Indeed, the example arguments you show are equally schizophrenic because they follow no logic whatsoever, and that you think the latter trumps the former because it contains one fact makes you appear perpetually stoned. This makes you impossible to reason with, because there is no reasoning with someone who is quite literally a nutcase.

Most of this is ad hominem. I should also note that you have never once demonstrated that we should care about results, or whether harm occurs to people.

Ridicule, actually. But the only one who has failed to demonstrate his point is the one who uses "sky is green --> thus Hitler should kill jews" as an example of an argument a sane human being would or should even bother debunking. Your original argument was "FREEDUMs = good because Libertarian definition", and my argument is basically saying "the definition is hypocritical and leads to a contradictory result". Besides, why should you care? You already said you can't be arsed to help save people based on your definition of freedom, the next question is why should you bother to FREE people either if that is the case? And thus, why should I care what your definition of freedom is? Clearly, its freedom for you but not for me.

That's the way it always is with Libertarians. They default to hypocrisy, dishonesty, and ego-centrism every time, and their philosophy encourages it.

That's quite an extraordinary claim, mr. Hitlerjugend. Got extraordinary evidence? You could start with that linguistic challenge, just to show all human cultures even have a concept of freedom.

I don't know enough languages for that, but I really don't have to.

Tell me, how many tribes consider it a moral wrong for an individual in a tribe to pack up, leave, and head to a new one, if they have committed no offence against the tribe? I'll give you an advance prediction: None.

You didn't answer the larger challenge. Likewise, your question is a red herring, and your prediction is based on no logic whatsoever. If you just up and left a tribal society without warning, the tribe would revile your name for leaving your family and friends like the douchbag you (yes, you) are. Labor is a commodity in tribal societies. Freedom isn't. You have no idea how close knit a community has to be when the tribe is constantly on the move and contains at most a few dozen families. Besides which, you would probably starve if left on your own in the wilderness.

Failure to back up extraordinary claims and using red herrings as a distraction: why I am no longer bothering.

Your explanation is Sam Harris level-retarded.

Complaining about Ad Hominems, and then spitting them back at third parties? Nice.

Your basic response here is contractualism.

Strawman. Read my posts more carefully, and read them in context.

This is Yudowskyite language, not contractualist. Taken in isolation, this section would point to the idea that we should attempt to encodify the human conception of "moral", take it to its logical conclusion, and go from there. Classic Yudowsky.

The problem with that is that is that you get intuitions. I'll elaborate later in this post.

No, I believe that would be your position, Mr. "human intuitions are God". More namedropping, more strawmen. More inability to read things in context. More inability to recognize ridicule. More hypocrisy. More reasons I should stop caring what you think, or what you post.

The problem with virtue ethics is that it's a bad offer.

Being contrarian for the sake of it. One more reason not to listen to your opinions.

Again, though, you are free not to accept my morals. And I am free to judge you for it. Most people feel that their life is somehow bettered by having a moral code, hence the very existence of ethics. Your statements about morality not needing to conform to practical realities and ultimately coming down to a self admitted mess of contradictory intuitions makes you essentially an unwitting nihilist, and I don't feel like I need to justify my need to satisfy my conscience to nihilists.

Let me go through my basic argument. We start with Hume and the Is-Ought distinction, which says that you cannot get from an Is to an Ought. This rules out many possible arguments for morality, such as Kant's categorical imperative.

Hume was wrong. He assumed that you can't, therefor he couldn't. And yet he still lived morally anyway, because he believed that logic is limited in what it can prove (and Kurt Godel later demonstrated from first principles that this must be the case for any sufficiently complex Formal System). If you start from different moral assumptions, such as "moral integrity is necessary for living as a complete and fully satisfied human being" or "these are the goals that all living things strive for", then its easy to go from facts to ethics.

What the is-ought distinction means is that the state of the world isn't always as we wish it to be. An example is-ought fallacy is "these are human intuitions, therefor they are moral", even though evil acts are just as frequently motivated by our intuitions as righteous acts. Instead, we make the world better by observing how it is and comparing it to our desires, then acting on the difference. The thing Hume never thought of was that we can make our own species the subject of scientific study to gain a better appreciation of what we really desire-- that is, he predates the formal study of psychology. Not surprising.

You still haven't met the challenge of showing you understand human psychology. Your given method of analyzing human psychology is based entirely on analyzing yourself, without accounting for hypocrisy or bias on your part. You refuse to justify this, and refuse to accept the validity of the alternative method. Refusal to show evidence, or accept that not everyone will see your conclusions as self evident. More reason to stop justifying myself to you.

I know that this country is a fiction made up by you for the sake of argument, but a slippery slope is still as slick.

Do you at least concede that with Maristan in the state as I described it in the first post, this conclusion follows? And therefore that, in the scenario as written, the Karaks would be unwise to take your harsh approach?

Instead of addressing my argument, you repeat your invalidated conclusion. More reason to stop trying.

Let's look at things from the perspective of post-war Maristan.

I'm going to make the assumption that the Karaks, having instutited a new government, pack up and leave rather than keeping the country under long term occupation, after having taken economic concessions for themselves. The reason is that any long-term occupation would turn into a Vietnam or Iraq anyway and would thus merely delay the inevitable.

The ordinary Maristanis are going to be massively resentful of the new system and the new Karak-imposed Constitution. The minorities will probably support it, but to the average Maristani it will be seen as Karakisation imposed by force. Having lost loved ones to the Karaks will reinforce this.

Not being Western in culture, Maristan does not have Western-style safeguards. We've seen that the army was willing to commit a coup and that Maristani politicans were willing to commit genocide. So why assume they have the same safeguards against dictatorship a western democracy does?

The course I would ultimately predict for Maristan would be what in our world is called a Banana Republic for a time, and that's if they're lucky. More likely, they would fall into a "standard" model dictatorship. Either way, racial tension would likely lead to a series of civil wars.

I don't call Saddam's Iraq civilised. Why should I call the resulting Maristan civilised

This is nothing but a set of slapped together assumptions. Why would the Karaks leave when a slapped together government is all that is preventing the Maristani's from going back to slaughtering each other? The US and Russia occupied Berlin for decades after WWII, an experience quite different from Iraq, showing that not all occupations are destined to end the same way. Your own story in the OP was that the Karaks concurred the whole country, inconsistent with this line of reasoning.

You keep stating that their culture is non-western, but that is what they aren't. At no point do you tell us what they are like. Wait, scratch that. The characters and institutions you describe paint us a picture of a country that is not only western, but hyper western-- a country dominated by Federalist ideals, multiple western institutions like the courts, a legislative body, democratic process, judicial review, racism, xenophobia, Duty to a failed Constitution, commitment to the Intentions of the nations "Founding Fathers", and a suspiciously Libertarian system of multiple levels of Sovereignty. Your arguments defending their actions all stem from western, and more specifically moronically conservative, philosophies and cultural constructs. Sorry, pussycat, your story is so full of holes at this point I don't buy that anymore.

Inconsistency not as a mistake, but seemingly as a matter of course: more reason to just file you under "idiots to scroll over without reading".

What is so hard about "selfishness is bad when others are suffering on your watch" do you disagree with? Selfishness is one of the biggest single recurrent themes in your posts that you keep trying to draw attention away from. It isn't working on me. Sorry to deflate your balloon but it isn't.

Nobody has provided a satisfactory ethical argument for this claim about duties to others.

In my ethical system, duties come from a social-contract like idea- that you have implicitly promised to act in a certain way. But the PM, Premier, Supreme Court judge etc have promised to uphold the Constitution and nothing more.

Inability to answer a goddamn question when challenged. Insistence on throwing out your opinions (and this is, what, the third time you've changed political theories to suit your purposes? Fourth?) without justifying them.

We agree on Aristotle, so I won't go into that. *snip irrelevance*

Namedropping philosophers (who you appear to be unfamiliar with) doesn't even begin to prove your idea that its bad to mix science and philosophy. I can namedrop too-- Jeremy Bentham explicitly justified Utilitarianism's, erm, utility based on the fact that it was scientific, and the leading approaches of his time weren't (*Cough Kant Cough*). You were saying?

Cherrypicking. Now that's a new one for you, I think.

Your challenge amounts to putting your fingers in your ears and saying "lalalalala, I can't hear you".

Quinean crap. I'm asking you to actually demonstrate the validity of the scientific method with regard to questions of ethics.

Considering the namedropping accusation he ignored previously, and the accusation he's failing to address, I'm just going to let this speak for itself.

Why not give an actual argument here, rather than rhethoric?

Because I'm calling bullshit on your claims, fucknut. You don't understand the Burden of Proof, and that's why I can't stand you.

The problem here is that IF for any given moral claim it is merely cultural morality rather than genetic, how on earth am I supposed to call it part of the human moral code? The alternative is to abandon a Universial Morality alltogether.

Therefore ONLY those parts of morality founded in the human genetic code are tenable. The rest are bullshit.

First, why do you dismiss morality if you can't find one universal moral code? Many moral codes can ultimately achieve the same goal to various degrees, and its easy to demonstrate that human needs are universal. Second, you are so full of yourself that you can't accept my answer to your challenge, and that's scientific study of the human psyche. You have an idée fixe on genetic explanations for morality, and more importantly with "intuitions" rather than needs or desires, and the rest of us find that ridiculous.

You only see contradictions because you see implications I don't make, or don't see implications I do make.

In this case, I admit that there is a problem with human intuitions- some intuitions contradict each other. My system is a solution to this- encode ethics as Principles humans value and take them to their logical conclusions. Principles contradicted by several other principles, despite being intuitive, are dropped.

You contradict yourself with every other word, including these two paragraphs. On one hand you say you don't contradict yourself, on the other hand you admit the system you advocate contradicts itself. Its not a leap to say that you contradict yourself by advocating that ethic.

I mean, damn man, you just keep doing this. I don't contradict myself! I do contradict myself! I think human intuitions are the source of all morality! But morality has to be absolute, so you can't second guess yourself even if that's what your intuitions tell you! The PM didn't go to war! Then he did go to war! And these are just examples where you backpedaled so fast and so suddenly that it wasn't even subtle.

Not true- having read many more ethicist's works than you, I see most ethicists merely assume based on intuitions rather than appeal to empirical evidence.

It's not perfect, but it's up to the standards of professional ethicists, which is the best we've got.

Except that every ethical theory you have tried to talk about you plainly reveal ignorance of, and not just in this thread. It paints a picture of someone who namedrops philosophers (most of whom I do have at least a passing familiarity with, or even follow) in the hopes that bluster will save you from criticism. I call bullshit.

You think I'm going to violate my own privacy? Besides, such a proof would be ridicolously easy to fake- I could just show the uni details of somebody who wasn't me and claim it was.

3. Be Honest. Around here, dishonesty is much worse than rudeness. We take a particularly dim view of anyone who pretends to be someone he's not, or who brags about false accomplishments.

Considering your consistent attempts to namedrop, I think it is a reasonable request to show that you actually have the education you claim. If you really think your privacy is that important, perhaps you shouldn't be telling people online what university you attend or what major you are studying for?

Of course, if the moderators think I am asking too much, so be it, I'll withdraw the request. I still have reason to suspect you are lying about how well read you are in philosophy, however.

And that pretty much sums up why I am not responding to your posts any longer.

[Thanas]

no, Formless challenge for credentials is perfectly ok and in fact one I would like to see answered. PM a neutral mod like Edi, Pezook etc with the info if you don't trust anybody else, but answer it you will, Carinthium.