Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
In Warcraft you can be both a woman and a dolphin at the same time (druid class). You have to play Max Paine if you want to be a cannonball, and I'm yet to hear of any game where you can play a skunk, but then again, a lot of people can do this without resorting to fantasy.
-
However, a surprisingly large number of women play WoW.
I was making a joke, btw, not attempting a threadjack. I'll just be amused by anyone out there attempting to Google the Wearable Art and ending up wading through Warcraft forums about designer armor and mounts.
Re genderbending in WoW, I have to say the more interesting thing to me is why women don't tend to do it, not why men do it.
-
It would have been hard to choose a more unfortunate acronym for something that is "for, by and about women" than WOW, since that is already pwned by World of Warcraft.
-
I'm not sure that the motivation behind the more famous proponents of emotivism can be so easily seen as attempting to ridicule moral statements, on account of their similarity to taste. It may well be that they simply want to establish where fact ends and opinion begins. Ayer was a positivist after all, and both he and Stevenson speak of a number of logical statements that can be made about moral inferences. I think it can be presumed that they thought similar statements could be made about tastes.
For example, one could say "1. Bob stole a wallet. 2. Theft harms society. 3. What harms society is wrong. 4. Therefore what Bob did was wrong".
4. Does follow from 1, 2, 3. But 1 and 2 can perfectly well be challenged. Perhaps Bob did not actually steal the wallet. Perhaps some kinds of theft don't harm society. These can be matters of fact, without undermining the emotivist position, and an emotivist can join with anyone else in rejecting 4 on account of errors in 1 and 2 alone, without needing their recourse to parsing 3 as an arbitrary taste. Or 4 could be "4(ii). Therefore Bob should have his hand cut off". This can be challenged as simply not following from the premises.
The emotivists differ from realists and subjectivists in saying that 3 can't be a statement of fact (or perhaps that the facticity of 3 can't be known), it is a judgment based on feeling. It may have it's own premises, but always at the bottom of it is a judgment based on a preference. 3 could perhaps come from "3.1 Something that harms society being accepted as a principle risks that it may harm me, or my loved ones" and "3.2 I don't want myself or my loved ones harmed." (some kind of appeal to selfishness). There are many other possible justifications for 3 (which may quite logically lead to 3) but in themselves will contain at least one completely arbitrary statement of preference. Wikipedia's article on emotivism puts it quite nicely:
"Ayer's defense is that all ethical disputes are about facts regarding the proper application of a value system to a specific case, not about the value systems themselves, because any dispute about values can only be resolved by judging that one value system is superior to another, and this judgment itself presupposes a value system."
I would probably be a little more careful by saying "all truly rational ethical disputes". Of course there are still irrational disputes, and disputes involving reasoning which is spurious.
Brandt simply asserts that reasoning is not involved in tastes of the tongue, with the aim for showing that morals are not arbitrary like tastes. I gave counterexamples. He also asserts that people never consider earlier tastes "unfounded" (you are correct, I have not yet addressed this point). I have to say that I have done that many a time. I had a completely unfounded dislike of Chinese food for quite a while as a child - I was of the opinion that it was too oily and salty. But I was simply wrong about this. I was making an ungrounded jump from my experience of the Chinese restaurants I had experienced in 1970's Auckland to all Chinese food. It is also quite possible that I was mistaken about it being too salty - as a child I knew nothing about MSG and was probably confusing the tastes. But disliking oily salty food at that time was a 'mere' preference, and it has changed with time.
Not all moral changes are as significant as going from racist to not, and that doesn’t really explain the way we consistently view prior positions as unfounded.
There are a great many things in moral positions that can be unfounded well before we ever get to the base assumptions - assumptions we may never challenge in our entire lives. We can completely change moral positions on account of some actual facts showing that a position we had derived from our base assumptions is wrong, without ever changing the base assumptions. In doing so we could logically say our earlier position was 'unfounded', without ever noticing that our current position is also unfounded. That's the thing about basic assumptions - you don't even notice them.
In the rare cases where our base assumptions change, I suggest it's seldom because our new position is 'more true'. It's almost entirely going to be due to very powerful psychological appeals, rather than rational ones. I did not particularly love children before I had some, now I do, and I value them more highly. But people who don't have them, and don't especially value them, are not necessarily wrong in any absolute sense. I just fundamentally disagree with them about the value of children.
The simplest explanation is to conclude moral discourse is not like stating pure taste preferences, and that moral statements should prima facie be considered propositions.
Ayer is pretty clear in saying quite a few moral utterances are propositions. But he thinks the base ones aren't always parsible into the "I don't like X" form. Sometimes they aren't even verbal at all. That is just one particular parse that highlights the arbitrariness - "I don't like X" is a proposition (it could be false - I could be lying), but it's not one anyone else can really dispute, if it does indeed merely report a feeling or sensation, or instinct, or upbringing.
I was consistent in saying that moral reasoning seems to have some things in common with statements we make regarding empirical matters, if that’s what you mean. In fact, I specifically stated that point in my last post, so I’m not sure why you’re confused.
I don't deny that 'moral reasoning' is just like any other reasoning, if it is to have any validity at all. It uses inferences and evidence, just the same as science does. The differences is that some of the evidence, upon which the very basis of the moral rests, is subjective, which separates morals very much from something like evolution. People who disagree with evolution are doing so in spite of objective evidence. People who reject utilitarianism are generally doing it because some bunch of counterexamples make them feel that it's wrong. In some cases it just doesn't strike any chord with them at all, as in the case of Nietzsche. I can't prove wrong Nietzsche's views of how most of the human race are morally irrelevant, and that unhappiness isn't bad, so long as you're feeling it strongly. I just don't like it.
Not valuing reason is more of a problem. Like I asked you before, how else would we begin to discuss morality?
That's really an impossible question to answer. Reason is not a clearly defined thing, so any alternatives I posited could just be called Reason.
Well, baby is fed and settled so I can go back to bed. Thanks for your responses - this debate is interesting to me, I confess to never having had a decent interlocutor before on this point.
-
Emotivists say taste preferences are just expressions of a sensation, not statements that we can consider as propositions.
Probably more accurate to say they are expressions of a preference. "Yuk" is not a sensation, it's a judgment, possibly, but not exclusively, based on a sensation.
If you expand the notion of taste to something that you can apply reason, you undermine the emotivist position. If they’re wrong to look at taste so narrowly, they’re already wrong about morality.
Or I'm undermining reason, as I said. Reason itself could be seen as a series of judgments based on sensations. Any reasoning about the world, anyway.
They compare moral positions to taste to devalue the nature of the former, in the sense that they say morals are just expressions of an unarguable sensation.
They are expressions of judgments about sensations. But I'm not so sure that sensation is totally divorced from reason - the "theory ladeness of observation" (see Kuhn and Quine) is a well known problem in philosophy of science, and generalizes to other discussions of sensation. So I'm not so sure they're trying to devalue morals. They're just refusing to allow that the very basis of them derives from anything other than feelings we have about things.
To that extent, it's a very powerful position, because it does not get caught up in overriding actual sensations of a wrong by a theory we have previously settled on. Nor does it fall prey to the usual problem of moral theories - that they just ignore anyone who disagrees with the most fundamental axioms. If I simply feel that the Categorical Imperative is bullshit right from the start, then arguments I have with people who base their idea about morality on it will simply be at an impasse.
Generally I think that the way people settle on a moral theory is to look at derived practical consequences of it. If they don't square with moral intuitions, then they don't like the theory. But having settled on one, there is still always the possibility of a consequence that hadn't been thought of or discussed. To disallow this is simply to settle on a dogma, and becomes less and less tenable, the more it overrides intuitions.
I think there is, and it brings up again a point you’ve not yet addressed. I’ve changed my taste in olives over the years, in part by eating them now and then and just getting used to the taste. But even so, I don’t consider that my younger self was mistaken in his view of olives as yuk. That was just my sensation.
I think I have addressed this. I said that you have failed to show that when you change your morals that there is a "truth" in the matter, that you were clearly right or wrong either before or after. You've merely asserted that you moved from wrong to right, because you used a process that you call reason for some of it. This, I would call the sophistry of the anti-emotivists. Certainly moral statements differ a great deal from taste statements in their practical implications, so it matters a great deal more to us what the moral tastes of other people are than their tongue tastes. To that extent we are far more likely to loudly claim distaste for certain things, like racism or slavery, because we have an inkling of what racists and slave-drivers will do if they are not disapproved of, and we don't like it (now).
I know sceptics dwell on how we are still debating moral issues today, as if that shows something isn’t proven, but I do think we make moral progress and would point to a lack of support for slavery as one. Millions of people still argue evolution is unproven; that is, to paraphrase you, millions of observers do not agree that an empirical point has been settled.
Are we back to scientific reasoning now? I thought you'd given up on saying moral theorizing was like that. My opinion on scientific statements is that they generally do have a truth or falsity, although I must confess it's only an opinion. I believe there is a world independent of my mind and there are other people out there, and the world is independent of their minds too. That being so, statements about that world are 'objective'. Of course it's only an opinion, and perhaps we're in the Matrix or any number of other Cartesian dilemmas. That can't really be disproved, I just don't like to think it's true - it leads nowhere.
But morality does not necessarily have any existence independent of ourselves.
I think the biggest challenge for emotivists is that morality does not necessarily *not* have any independent existence either. It's not a provable point, but to claim there is nothing objective about morals is currently as much of an assertion as the claim that there are. To that end, my feeling on emotivism is simply one of "support for a possible viable hypothesis, that challenges in a fundamental way the very basis of most other moral theories".
Like I said, the number of beliefs I hold "absolutely" is near zero. I just favor one or other. So I'm quite sympathetic to, for instance, Utilitarianism, particularly the Harm Principle. But when I make statements about right and wrong based on it, I'm always thinking hypothetically - "X is wrong IF emotivism is wrong. If it is not, then I just don't like X". But that's a real mouthful every time you're discussing morals, so I usually drop it, and just say "X is wrong, IMHO".
One of my biggest motivations for leaning towards it is actually "self distrust". I'm well aware that people can argue themselves into believing any position. That's a dangerous thing, if you think that because you've used reason, that you're therefore right, or even dealing with a subject on which it is even possible to be right or wrong. I don't trust 'reason' anywhere near as much as I used to, possibly an odd consequence of philosophy training, but also highly driven by life experiences of practical reasoning since then.
-
@Russell, you say you don't buy it, but then you talk about the customer's perspective again. I was talking about the owners, who have no interest in turning away any customers that they can fit into the joint.
For sure they would have an interest in improving the place, but you could hardly argue that being constantly packed out is bad for business. And it is constantly packed out, and that's what the complaints here are about. Clearly, despite the fact that everyone would always like any improvements that they can get, they already like it enough, or they wouldn't go there.
-
The Wiki does indeed back up the notion that commandos used to go without undies, though I seriously doubt that - undies and socks were very valuable to any soldiers anywhere - there is a great deal more chafing and less hygiene without them -. It doesn't really make sense to go without them for either reason.
Depends on the undies, and the conditions. Wet underwear are worse than no underwear, and in the tropics, they can be wet constantly. Also, Jockies style undies ride right up into the deepest cracks and stay there, particularly if you are engaged in heavy exercise.
I was reading yesterday that some of it may be a macho thing too - that if you wore undies you could hide whether or not you had shit yourself. So only the bravest soldiers went without.
Socks are a different matter. I've never heard of any soldiers recommending to go without those.
-
Considering how many of the commenters mentioned difficulty getting to the bar, that's not necessarily the case...
90% head-count and +50% drink sales might be a better better proposition?
Might be. Might also not work out like that. Trouble getting to the bar is usually because too many people are at the bar. Which is not bad for the bar, just the people. Probably there is a diminished return once the bar is running at capacity, but it's still a return, if people also paid for a ticket. It's not in the bar's interest to turn anyone away short of their legal head count (unless they are causing trouble).
In my experience, when it's getting really hard to get to the bar, that seems to massively increase the volume of sales - people know they won't be able to casually saunter up, and instead buy everything in huge rounds, which is much more efficient for the bar - less transactions, of higher value, and the ability to multitask, pouring several drinks at once.
Which is shithouse for some customers, and the staff - I personally can't stand places like that. But are the owners going to care? I doubt it. As I was saying before, there clearly are enough people who actually like that kind of thing to keep it going in perpetuity.
-
Trouble is, it's most often an issue at the shows by touring international acts that music-lovers do want to come to, presold at $50 a ticket.
That certainly is trouble for those people. But seeing from the KA's point of view, why would they particularly care? If the place is bursting at the seams constantly, and some people don't want to come because of that, then they're pretty much customers that the venue would rather didn't show up.
I'm not saying it's a good thing, I just doubt that customer migration will self-sort the problem. Having the place packed is the optimal profit situation for them, so it's not in their interests in either the short or the long term to just cut back on the number of paying customers. It's really one of those things that can only be fixed by regulation from the outside, or the touring bands themselves putting their collective feet down. I have to say I've seldom heard of any band that would be bummed by an overfull house.
-
Mocha? Not surprised you have troubles! That's not just a coffee and milk problem, but a chocolate problem too. Borders on insoluble.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 847 848 849 850 851 … 1066 Older→ First