So far I've seen Mass Debate put to a really good use but what bothers me is that I've never seen any philosophical or ethical theory debates so I'm asking if anyone here ever studied philosophy and/or ethics during their education. Want to share your view on a certain theory? Pass down some knowledge to other FPers? Post it here.
I'll start off by outlining a simple(ish) theory known as Utilitarianism:
Utilitarianism was first created by a man named Jeremy Bentham. He said Utilitarianism is doing what brings the most happiness to the majority of people, he developed a checklist sort've thing to find out how much happiness an action would bring, he called it the Hedonic Calculus which takes the following into account. Intensity of happiness, duration of happiness, certainty of happiness occuring, how soon will the happiness take place, how many people will be effected by the happiness and will the happiness be followed by other feelings of opposite kind. This theory of Utilitarianism is known as 'Act' Utilitarianism, there are two others known as 'preference' and 'rule' Utilitarianism.
Does FP think this theory works? Why? Any other theories FP's wise men can discuss and explain?
The Meditations. Right from the off to me it doesn't work yet it is regarded in education as the main piece of literature to do at A2 level.
Forgiveness is good for your health? Love conquers evilness? Don't be an asshole? (don't kill don't lie/insult or whatever the fuck)
Those are the first few things that I think are notable when talking about ethics and shit.
[QUOTE=icemaz;32682221]The Meditations. Right from the off to me it doesn't work yet it is regarded in education as the main piece of literature to do at A2 level.[/QUOTE]
The way I see it is that unfortunately its near enough impossible to please everyone and this is evident in countries and government choices. It may as well be the majority of the people feeling good which I know sounds extreme, I'd consider preference utilitarianism because they at least try and consider the majority and lessen their unhappiness a tad.
[QUOTE=Gekkosan;32682232]Forgiveness is good for your health? Love conquers evilness? Don't be an asshole? (don't kill don't lie/insult or whatever the fuck)
Those are the first few things that I think are notable when talking about ethics and shit.[/QUOTE]
If you feel guilty, you go around stressed for something. This often leads to minor annoying things like headaches, but you can also get very mad at small things, losing friends and other.
[QUOTE=Gekkosan;32682232]Forgiveness is good for your health? Love conquers evilness? Don't be an asshole? (don't kill don't lie/insult or whatever the fuck)
Those are the first few things that I think are notable when talking about ethics and shit.[/QUOTE]
From what I've studied ethics is, in a simple sentence 'what makes me a better person? How can I make the world a better place?'
[QUOTE=Midas22;32682415]From what I've studied ethics is, in a simple sentence 'what makes me a better person? How can I make the world a better place?'[/QUOTE]
On an individual level, you can hardly make a difference trying to better the world. But as people, we can make the difference any day if we all want to. Humans could be so much more than this, or could we?
First of all, people aren't moral or immoral, because, as you said, there is no free will, which morality depends on.
Your actions then are decided on some kind of programming.
First off, good and bad are measurements of worth. Worth can only exist in a consciousness, so things by themselves can't have worth. Secondly, I can split the range of conscious "actions"
into thought and emotion. Thought can be thought of as both sensory information as well as logical information (shit you derive yourself) but I can easily argue that all of this is merely things. An image of a rose is just a rose but instead of being located in the world, it's located in your mind.
And I've said before that things couldn't be given worth, so knowledge and thought can't be given worth either (I'll admit this part is a bit shaky) which leaves emotion.
Thirdly, I can also deconstruct any and all emotion into happiness and unhappiness regarding different aspects of life (envy would be unhappiness regarding others having what we want, etc.), which leaves us with only 2 things to work with: Happiness and Unhappiness. One is given positive worth (good) and the other negative worth (bad).
And envy, for an example is an emotion you attempt to delete, by definition, you want what the other has, so you want to delete the envy, which is an unhappy emotion. Which means all consciousnesses place negative worth on unhappiness and positive worth on happiness.
Happiness is this programming. You do whatever you think will make you happier, you and you alone, because you are incapable of feeling other people's emotions, and you evaluate situations and their level of happiness using ideals, or tastes.
These ideals are the ones that can be judged, and all you need to do to do it objectively is assume that happiness is objectively good, which it is, because worth (what makes something good) comes from consciousnesses only, and if happiness that propels us, then it is the only thing considered worthy of having, good, possessing worth.
And if your happiness is objectively good, then it is a characteristic of the universe and applies to everyone, same for all other consciousnesses.
With this follows (if you assume that happiness is the ONLY thing that is good, which it is, all human experiences eventually come down to a balance between happiness and unhappiness) that the sole rule for human conduct is maximization of happiness.
This is all premise. Now, tastes are divided into two mechanisms. The happiness, which comes from the realization of a taste, which is entirely subject and molded, and the consequences which are the natural consequences of the action, which depend on the nature of the action and are strictly objective, as they depend on the laws of physics and logic.
This is where the grading starts. The better ideals, the more efficient ones, are the ones whose consequences allow for you to perform more actions from which you will receive happiness, the happiness you get from the realization of the ideal does not come into the equation because you can mold to have any ideal whatsoever, you can't mold the laws of physics.
Medicine allows for one to live longer and better, sadism and violence do the opposite.
I mentioned how the one rule is to maximize happiness, but how should we?
There are rules, laws to the mechanics of happiness.
Firstly, we'll assume that happiness, as something that can rise and decrease can be measured in a numerical fashion. What is very hard is to find a scale, but that is not needed for the argument.
The first rule, which I already mentioned, is:
Every unit of happiness felt by any consciousness, in itself, is of the same value
The second one is in regards to happiness distribution.
Assuming person 1 has X U.H (units of happiness) and the other one also X/2 U.H., and we have an object which will, on a determined standard person, produce 50 U.H. and assuming that no other difference between them exists other than level of happiness (and that the object will produce happiness and not unhappiness on the people), who should we give the object to?
The sad person, merely because the less you have, the more of a happiness boost you will receive. Inversely for unhappiness, the unhappier you are, less importance you will give to bad things.
The second rule then is:
The same stimulus will not provoke the same variation in happiness of two equal people, disregarding their happiness levels.
Now, we know what is “moral” (i.e. efficient), and we (sort of) know how to figure out which situation is better when presented to us, now we need to see how we can predict situations.
Let’s imagine we have this situation.
A man must choose between taking or not taking a 5 dollar bill from someone, all other effects are neglectable.
First, we need to find all possible consequences for each outcome and attribute them a happiness value. For the sake of argument, let’s assume money’s happiness value is equal to its monetary worth.
You get Situation A (he does) where we have Hpv = 5-5 (+5 for the man and -5 for the man he took the bill from) while situation B has an Hpv = 0+0 (nothing changed)
So both situations are equally valid, but what if we can’t (and we can’t, thanks quantum physics!) predict the future with a 100% rate of success, then we need to factor in probabilities.
Let’s think of a bet, would you bet your entire money for a chance at getting 5 dollars? It’s not ver y wise, but how do we calculate that one. Easy:
Situation A(he does) you get an Hpv= 5(dollars) x 0.5 (chance of winning) – 10000(his money) x 0.5 (chance of losing) while you invert the happiness values of each stimulus for situation B. Situation A is then the preferable choice.
BUT there’s a possibility the man running the wager shoots you if you win, you must also factor that, there’s a chance he’ll shoot and miss and the man ends up killing him because of it. There is a chance the man who just died were a future Hitler, or maybe that he would be future Hitler’s murderer.
A nigh infinite amount of probabilities that must be factored in, but ones we can ignore since the probabilities of the guy being/killing the future Hitler are near identical in both situation so, when putting one against the other, we can ignore them.
And it's not that it can't be measured. It can, we have been doing so ever since we were born. If happiness levels fluctuate and we know something makes us happier than something else, then we've been using numbers (estimations) all the time. What's VERY hard is using a standard unit. That depends on the brain; I'm thinking maybe concentration of happiness hormones or number of neurons fired. I don't know enough about the brain to talk about this.
[editline]8th October 2011[/editline]
I have copy-pasted this so much here. :v:
It's original so criticism is more than welcome.
You can't squeeze that into a few paragraphs?
Like about happiness you wrote, it's relative and you adapt to it. You get your leg amputated, you'll get used it. And that goes for winning the lotto. etc
I find so much of this topic to be of interest. Perhaps one of my favorite philosophical analogies is Plato's cave from The Republic. Pretty basic yet very important. I tried reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and I didn't get very far. The book is quite criticized for being poorly written and confusing, which is one reason I didn't get very far. The second was that I kept coming across sentences that really made me go off into a thought tangent.
Some I don't think people realize is that the more interesting philosophies are the ones that you disagree with. This is because they make you think. It's not as though philosophers make weak arguments, and the very fact that someone is putting out a strong argument out there that challenges your believes makes you want to read it.
As far as my own philosophy and where it comes from, most of it comes from Locke. It of course falls more into the libertarianism, but the main ideas where laid and inspired by Locke. There are two rules.
1. The non-aggression axiom. Any force is immoral unless force is enacted upon you. If someone is trying to kill you, it is of course alright to use force against the other person as that person is enacting force on you.
2. Strict private property rights. Many of these ideas go into a system of trade and homesteading. Only voluntary exchanges. A method of determining ownership is pretty key in that if I steal something from you, I shouldn't be penalized at all for stealing that object if you had stolen that object from me. Common sense.
There are two different ideologies, one of minarchism, and one of anarchism. I can go into the differences if anyone is interested and the different justifications. I can only go into how various topics fit into these various principals. I myself was confused as to how it would be possible to take care of children without violating the non-aggression axiom or without declaring them property, yet this two principals are applied across the entire philosophy.
Most philosophers do like the sound of their own voice and do tend to ramble on, I've been reading Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold and he just rambles and loses me. As for the Cave I find it extremely interesting because of all the objects that are representations of things such as truth and reality.
Utilitarianism is very flawed in my opinion, I'd have to say Kantism is more attractive for me. But then again I'm a catholic so that affects me a lot. Bentham thought poetry was no different from a childs game 'push-pin' and was happy to follow a swine ethic so I'm not a big fan of his philosophy.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]First of all, people aren't moral or immoral, because, as you said, there is no free will, which morality depends on.[/quote]
It'd be nice if a case was made for there being no free will, though it isn't particularly relevant to what your claim, unless you are also to say that that action cannot affect human action. For example, would a policy where those caught with marijuana would be executed not result in a decrease in marijuana use? Even if you accept that free will doesn't exist, it is certainly within the bounds of thought that action can be affected and that particular actions such as murder and rape. By you're own logic, you're would blame the law for not being strict enough for disincentivizing such behavior.
As far as I can tell, you quite well understand this quite well, and your whole argument later is a contradiction of the claim that there is due to free will there is no morality, though it is certainly not implicit.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]First off, good and bad are measurements of worth. Worth can only exist in a consciousness, so things by themselves can't have worth.[/quote]
There needs to be far more on this concept of worth especially when it is referenced to so much. Worth is a term that is used in many circumstances and it is difficult to know what you mean by it.
Why can worth only exist in consciousness? Why can't exist in material things? There is likely an argument as to this, but without making it the idea kind of falls apart. This could connect with your definition of worth, I don't know, you want to assume the reader doesn't know what you mean.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]Secondly, I can split the range of conscious "actions"
into thought and emotion. Thought can be thought of as both sensory information as well as logical information (shit you derive yourself) but I can easily argue that all of this is merely things. [B]An image of a rose is just a rose but instead of being located in the world, it's located in your mind[/B].
And I've said before that things couldn't be given worth, so knowledge and thought can't be given worth either (I'll admit this part is a bit shaky) which leaves emotion.[/quote]
The bold describes a quite common thought. There is a name for it I believe, but I can't recall it. You should explain why an emotion can't be considered a thought and explain the differences between them and their triggers. What triggers a thought? What triggers and emotion? Like with the definition of "worth", you want to be really clear about what you're defining.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]Thirdly, I can also deconstruct any and all emotion into happiness and unhappiness regarding different aspects of life (envy would be unhappiness regarding others having what we want, etc.), which leaves us with only 2 things to work with: Happiness and Unhappiness. One is given positive worth (good) and the other negative worth (bad).
And envy, for an example is an emotion you attempt to delete, by definition, you want what the other has, so you want to delete the envy, which is an unhappy emotion. [B]Which means all consciousnesses place negative worth on unhappiness and positive worth on happiness.[/B][/quote]
I advice you to slow down and write more. You're trying to say too much in this paragraph and there is far too much that isn't addressed. This is a bit of a long post, but you really want to avoid paragraphs like this. It's difficult to see where these assertions are coming from, especially the bold. Disconnect yourself a bit from this and read back over it imagining someone else wrote it.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]Happiness is this programming. You do whatever you think will make you happier, you and you alone,[B] because you are incapable of feeling other people's emotions[/B], and you evaluate situations and their level of happiness using ideals, or tastes.
These ideals are the ones that can be judged, and all you need to do to do it objectively is assume that happiness is objectively good, which it is, because worth (what makes something good) comes from consciousnesses only, and if happiness that propels us, then it is the only thing considered worthy of having, good, possessing worth.[/quote]
The bold doesn't follow. To make that claim, you need to say far more. This could be an issue of me not being very clear on what you were claiming previous, which is a big reason why you need to be clear with what you're saying and expand on the biggest points.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]And if your happiness is objectively good, then it is a characteristic of the universe and applies to everyone, same for all other consciousnesses.
With this follows (if you assume that happiness is the ONLY thing that is good, which it is, all human experiences eventually come down to a balance between happiness and unhappiness) [B]that the sole rule for human conduct is maximization of happiness[/B].[/quote]
There is an issue of judgement here, it can be implied what you mean, but it makes it much harder to read.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]And if your happiness is objectively good[/quote]
Who's making the judgement as to if my happiness if good or bad? It's a bit ambiguous. Your claim would be more clear if you focused on society at large, would it be better if everyone in the world was unhappy, or happy? If you wanted to be scientific, you could cite research that shows happiness correlates with productiveness.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32685316]that the sole rule for human conduct is maximization of happiness[/quote]
This is also a bit confusing. As collectives, as individuals? By government force? By voluntary action? Through scientific method? The question is, who is maximizing happiness in this sentence?
The rest of what you offer is pretty similar to welfare economics. A good bit different, but the same kind of concept.
Don't look at my criticism as a negative or as nitpicking. I'm trying to offer suggestions that will help you make your argument stronger. You really want to be clear to ensure the readers are on the same line of thinking that you are, and you want to address questions the reader might have. A simple one is "what do you mean by worth". That would be really simple to answer, but without but clarification the text becomes confusing as the reader has to guess what you mean by "worth".
Gorgias by Plato was fucking amazing, the kid of thought blew my mind. I could find plenty of flaws in them but it was very refreshing, certainly influenced me.
[editline]9th October 2011[/editline]
Well, for your first point, you can see I wrote that in response to someone, but I'll make a case. (also quoted from this other thread .v:
[QUOTE]
First, this implies that the mind is something outside of the world, which I would call the soul.
The soul brings a lot of questions such as how can it exist without something governing its actions (if it's itself, it must act to let itself act, which means it would be impossible for it to act; if there is something over it, either it isn't free or we have a second-soul, creating the same situation as before.
Or how can it act on something if it's ruled by a different set of physical laws? For it to act it must exist in this plane of existence, but how can it exist here if it's being governed by a second set? And how would the boundary zone behave?
Secondly, there is vast documentation that physical things can influence the behavior of the mind. We have anti-depressants and other such chemicals.
Thirdly, I'm pretty sure genetics has an influence in one's values via one's intelligence or directly on the value system, and genetics are purely physical. There is a whole branch of psychology, called evolutionary psychology, based on this premise.
[/QUOTE]
Also, morality can't exist without free will because you don't do something because you're evil or good, just because of random chance and determinism and morality depends on the concepts of evil and good.
Which isn't to say there aren't good or bad things, just not actions caused by an interior good or bad.
And I would define worth as the quality that is desirable, that is to be over others.
____________
Because worth is something that was created by consciousnesses. Rocks don't value things.
____________
Because you can feel without thinking. This including knowing you're feeling. Recall the last time you felt such intense euphoria and try to remember if you were aware that you were feeling euphoria.
___________
Worth exists in Cness
Cness = thought and emotion
Thought is material (I'll admit that you could simply claim that material on the mind is not the same as material in the world) therefore worthless.
That leaves emotion. Emotions can be deconstructed in two emotions: Hness and Uness;
By the definition of the Uness emotions, you want to eliminate it
Which leaves Hness as the sole candidate for owner of worth.
__________
You can't feel others' emotions in the same way your television can't display other televisions' images. Just a similar image. (unless the 2 televisions/Cness are the same)
_________
What do you mean judgement? That it's meant to be used to judge something over the other?
_________
But then you'd fall in the question of why is productivity useful. I'm saying this not only leaning on my previous argument but as well as... "emotional definition". It's hard to describe. Happiness is good in the same way the laws of logic are right. I just don't fucking know why, they merely are, you can attest this for yourself.
And if it's impossible to find a situation in which you don't strive for happiness (the masochistic problem is fixed by merely saying feeling happy would make them more miserable than seeing themselves as miserable and striving for what they think would make them unhappy) then it's objectively good, but if it's O. good then that status can't be given to it by a human (repeating myself, am I not?) which means that it must be given by the universe, making it a fundamental property of it. And if it's a property of the universe, then it applies to all Cness.
Which means that one Cness' happiness (by itself) is just as worthy as any other's.
________
~Well, from what I said before, from a collective point. And by whatever actions necessary. The collective is. I don't see why this is relevant, though.
MountainWatcher, you talked about "units of happiness" in the other thread as well. I keep trying to tell you that these don't exist and what we consider "happiness" differs from person to person. It is fundamentally impossible for there to be "units of happiness". Your entire philosophy seems to be based around there being some kind of happy-o-meter and that's why the whole thing is flawed.
They do it in economics. They are called utils, or units of utility. The units are most used in welfare economics, and the whole concept of their existence is baffling. The concept of utility makes sense, it's just applying a number that doesn't.
Utility used right
[code]Best Friends
--------
1. John
2. Sally
3. Marge
4. George
5. Luke
[/code]
Utility used wrong
[code]Best Friends
--------
John = 53 utils
Sally = 42 utils
Marge = 30 utils
George = 25 utils
Luke = 1.8 utils
[/code]
I guess this gets into the question if everything can be assigned a number.
I disagree entirely.
Happiness means the same to everyone (well, ignoring the problems necessary to language). My point is: the emotion I characterized has the same characteristics in everyone.
And I'll present the argument I presented before. If you can call something more X than the other than that first thing has more X than the other, which implies quantity which implies a numerical system ruling over the phenomena.
I gotta say I don't actually agree with Utilitarianism, I just used it as a simple example. My favorite theory would have to be Virtue Ethics just because it takes cultural relativism into account and gives you more freedom to be a good person than other theories.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32689386]
Happiness means the same to everyone.[/QUOTE]
And therein lies the tiny wrench that completely destroys the engine of your whole philosophy. Happiness does [i]not[/i] mean the same to everyone. Not all consciousnesses are identical to yours, it's a very narrow and selfish world view to believe that's the case.
This is why Virtue Ethics is good because to a culture something may bring happiness to them that is frowned on in other cultures and communities. Virtue Ethics acknowledges this.
The reason I say that happiness is the same to everyone (and, mind you, thid doesn't mean that everyone derives happiness from the same things) because I can't define happiness as anything else than "a good feeling". That's what I mean with emotional definition.
And since everyone is capable of feeling "good emotions" I must say happiness is the same for everyone.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32689971]And since everyone is capable of feeling "good emotions" I must say happiness is the same for everyone.[/QUOTE]
what about depressives
[QUOTE=Zeke129;32689906]And therein lies the tiny wrench that completely destroys the engine of your whole philosophy. Happiness does [i]not[/i] mean the same to everyone. Not all consciousnesses are identical to yours, it's a very narrow and selfish world view to believe that's the case.[/QUOTE]
Happy people are usually at peace.. If you mean like, doing something bad makes someone happy, because I don't think that's happiness there, just hate or something.
This is where Utilitarianism fails, it assumes everything can be put into the same, uniform and unbiased quantities. Maybe on a smaller scale where things are similar it can be applied, the happiness of a single individual, but even then it fails because the pleasure/pain spectrum is still oversimplifying everything.
Even the calculations are biased. If everyone's happiness is the same then an equal benefit and happiness produced from slavery is fine. Short term happiness vs long term happiness, subject to inflation and cost of capital? Is happiness just an on-off matter or are there varying degrees of it and how do you account for those? Everything is just wrong.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;32696129]what about depressives[/QUOTE]
Depressives still have the capability to be happy, it's just blocked off.
[editline]9th October 2011[/editline]
[QUOTE=Devodiere;32696289]
Even the calculations are biased. If everyone's happiness is the same then an equal benefit and happiness produced from slavery is fine. Short term happiness vs long term happiness, subject to inflation and cost of capital? Is happiness just an on-off matter or are there varying degrees of it and how do you account for those? Everything is just wrong.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I don't see a problem with that.
When you feel the happiness doesn't matter, it just matters that you will. You enter only with the net gain.
Varying degrees, no standard unit yet, we need more neuroscience.
Implying that humans are ever consistently happy when everyone else around them is happy.
[QUOTE=MountainWatcher;32696362]Yeah, I don't see a problem with that.
When you feel the happiness doesn't matter, it just matters that you will. You enter only with the net gain.
Varying degrees, no standard unit yet, we need more neuroscience.[/QUOTE]
Of all the theories to hear that science will eventually prove it, Utilitarianism isn't one you would expect. How about serotonin and dopamine, get standard measurements for how much is released on each action and weight it up that way.
The point remains that happiness being the ultimate decider of if something is moral is stupid. As with slavery, the use of cheap labour to make everyone's lives better except the slaves is a hard one to put to it. How about gang rape, everyone except one person is enjoying it so it's moral, right?
[QUOTE=Devodiere;32696464]Of all the theories to hear that science will eventually prove it, Utilitarianism isn't one you would expect. How about serotonin and dopamine, get standard measurements for how much is released on each action and weight it up that way.
The point remains that happiness being the ultimate decider of if something is moral is stupid. As with slavery, the use of cheap labour to make everyone's lives better except the slaves is a hard one to put to it. How about gang rape, everyone except one person is enjoying it so it's moral, right?[/QUOTE]
I agree entirely. Though some would say 'it can never violate others' rights' but then whose conception of rights are we talking about?
[editline]10th October 2011[/editline]
I feel utilitarianism can be a factor in discussions, and certainly a point to start from, but certainly not the be-all-end-all of moral discussions.
[QUOTE=Devodiere;32696464]Of all the theories to hear that science will eventually prove it, Utilitarianism isn't one you would expect. How about serotonin and dopamine, get standard measurements for how much is released on each action and weight it up that way.
The point remains that happiness being the ultimate decider of if something is moral is stupid. As with slavery, the use of cheap labour to make everyone's lives better except the slaves is a hard one to put to it. How about gang rape, everyone except one person is enjoying it so it's moral, right?[/QUOTE]
Except happiness isn't on/off. The person suffering is suffering much more than the enjoyment of the happy person.
To claim anything BUT happiness has worth is idiotic.
Happiness is far too vague a human feeling. If people claim to live life "just to be happy" then they are not thinking deeper.
Discovering more within one's self is a bigger priority. It is just the heights people will go to in order to do this.
For example, forcing themselves to be in a situation where they would be uncomfortable in, in order to open new doors.
In that place, they'd be unhappy, but they'd be happy to be unhappy. Makes sense.
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