MSC

Anyone got any good recommendations for Philosophy of Music? My current reading is Margaret Urban Walkers - Moral Context. (Not the same field as philosophy of music but I want to branch out after this to something different.)

Firstly, thank you so much! I do really want to learn to code but my head gets crunched by a lot of the terminology within the first few lessons, however the sites I used weren't the ones you've supplied so I should give it a better go. in your experience, are there certain things you can interpret, that I cannot, about a programmer based on his code? Like say, knowledge, expertise, work ethic etc? I think my first stop there will be Gibbon! Thanks MigL. I have read a lot about the rise of the Roman Empire, but outside the Huns invasion led by Attila and the Ottoman siege and capture of Constantinople led by Mehmed the conqueror, I haven't read nearly as much about the decline and fall. Those are just the smallest tip of the iceberg too, being purely military history.

Fair enough. Textbooks allowed. I'll edit the OP to reflect. My apologies. Edit, nevermind. Won't let me edit the main body. Is that just on mobile browsing or can I not edit on pc either?

I believe in a more critical and interdisciplinary approach with freer use of language. As I would in certain types of lectures in a classroom. The only difference is we are all teachers and students here. Ethics and Meta-ethics is broad, trying to answer within too narrow constraints only diminishes the nuance and detail it requires and it's not wrong to write in an interdisciplinary fashion these days. If you think this is bad, try having this conversation in German at Goethe. Even so, you're the moderator. I've made my case. Decision is entirely yours. Thank you for your time. In adherence with the moderators note: The first claim of the five year old, should we say it is 75% mathematically accurate but 25% percent incorrect? To the 5 year old at least? The five year old wrote 75% of the full formula correctly, the percentage of the answer is 25% as the child is also being graded on showing his working and handwriting for single line sums. Should we say of the second non-verbal claim: It's okay to hit my sister is behaviorally 100% wrong? I suppose if it is 100% why even bother with the percentage? Note to moderator: I do apologise for this getting a little out there quickly before. I hope this makes up for that somewhat and shows I am listening to you. Moral contextualism is somewhat unheard of outside certain circles because the terminology is relatively new. I can dig up some readings (not mine) to send you if you'd like? Riveting stuff but it has a high demand for learning as it is pretty complex and some of the writers are at times, near incomprehensible without a lot of background explanation.

Absolutely! I wouldn't be a contextualist if I didn't already believe that. I think an underlying theme in my OP, is an unasked question; Is the binary a good tool for moral education? If so, at what stage of cognitive development, in regards to moral psychology?

Is reality just three lines? Is that what you're equating realism to or am I just misinterpreting what you're trying to paint? Would you be able to rephrase what you mean? I bet you enjoy structuralism too. I agree with your sentiment toward modern minimalism. Just lazy contrarianism if you ask me.

Can you not give me an impression of realism? Maybe that's why I was openly and sincerely appreciative. Any psychologist will tell you that word choice can convey potent and relevant emotional meaning. I think you'd enjoy reading into the concept of "Philosophical feeling" and Philosophy of non-verbal emotive language. If you haven't already, if you have then you are welcome on a future post about that

What is the best entry level book for your field/fields of expertise? Self directed homework. Feel free to add a personal book list in the order you'd read them in. No textbooks please. Unless that is stylistic of an individual relevant and important author. Thanks so much in advance!

New post will be needed soon. I appreciate your artistically and linguistically expressive short responses. I genuinely wish I was capable of that, I made a point to study stoicism but I took temperance to mean only speak when it is required, so what do you do if you feel a lot is required? Unfortunately making myself clear isn't always easy and I can't seem to get away from excessive detail. Oh well, my later publications will require a heavy hand with the highlighter!

Actually yes! I can't see the original comment you made for some reason? Can screenshot if you need proof of that. No matter, I can see it now that you've shared it and agree with everything you said. Unfortunately, there isn't a subsection in philosophy for meta-ethics There probably should be though, you can ask the admins about that maybe? I'm a bit new to the forum to be asking for structural context changes. I do apologise if it felt like I was just straight up ignoring you! Will retract the comment reaction. That was unfair and I'm sorry if it justifiably upset you.. Although also a lucky coincidence for your point. I made an incorrect conclusion based on a lack of knowledge that was outside of my control. Incorrect is a lovely term I think, really helps us separate mistake from intent. Do you think those who lacked intent for harm should be punished or is apology always sufficient? Would you agree if I said, "we are greater than the sum of our intentions"?(Guess which tv show that is from anyone? One of the greatest Sci-Fi shows of the last decade at least!) For example, could we say that people who conform to the binary and reject the reading of books on ethics even though they know they exist? Or is it enough that they are watching Morally centred narratives in tv, cinema and music? What about those who completely reject engaging with art that they know us out there? Sorry, your comment that I can't see on the thread wss actually really good and got me thinking a lot! Sorry for writing so much. You did not come across as terse at all. None of your word choices expressed that tone and I did not try to imagine a voice saying the words. Well, actually I suppose some generic AI voice (like microsoft Sam) works because you didn't send a voice recording along with the message to convey your true spoken tone. What about individuals whom have been diagnosed with 40/40 points for anti-social personality disorder whom have been found to be completely lacking their amygdala? Are they 100% psychologically bad but also free of moral responsibility, due to a brain abnormality beyond their control? I still agree with keeping them out of the general population but only out of pragmatic ethics. Or should we believe these individuals are in some way reformable and therefore morally responsible? Edit: I don't sympathise with these people, I do empathise but they aren't the same thing. Their actions make me just as angry as they do for most people.

😄 Indeed. I do so love this planet. Would be better if we didn't always feel so caught between a rock (People) and a hard place (Nature)... Although... maybe there is only the hard place and I'm imagining the rock?

It is a meta-ethical question actually, what are your grounds for claiming it isn't? I wrote the OP and gave ground to Studiots excellent point, that the OP forces binary choices. So now we've moved onto delineation to escape the binary and carry on a collaborative discussion, instead of me wasting peoples times by defending a point not worth defending, and getting upset by it like I believe, if my idea is attacked, I am attacked. I don't believe that. Do you have an answer to those questions?

I do so appreciate people who reject binaries! However, is it a case of delineation through scaling or categorising? Should we be quantitative or qualitative when we think of things being good or bad? Right or wrong? What sounds better to you; A given action could be said to be 60% wrong? A given action could be said to be a type of wrong? Or a joint application of both?

This is all very context-sensitive. I'd say that the avocado cannot be the thing that makes a moralistic determination. If I had fed you avocado five minutes before you told me you were allergic, I'd have done something bad. Because I've worked in kitchens and know better than to prepare a meal for someone without asking about allergens or dietary requirements. Even if it is just a mistake, my knowing better makes it negligent. An amateur to food safety rules and procedures would have made an honest moral mistake which would be wrong, not bad. It would be bad for you to self-harm by eating avocado knowing of your allergy, it would be bad for your wife to feed you avocado, since she should know of your allergy. The avocado is blameless in that it has zero choice in whether it gets eaten, it's an avocado. It's literally poison to most other animals on the planet, I think it might even be something only we have evolved to eat. It's an evolutionary defence mechanism to give the seed it's best chance to germinate and grow. I'm of the belief that behaviours and actions can be bad. However causal responsibility, and moral responsibility aren't the same thing. If I cause some kind of unintentional harm to some else, where I couldn't have been reasonably expected to know any better, I'm causally responsible but not morally. If I did know better then I'd be morally responsible. I think people, can be sick, they can be wrong. I think the things we should be morally judging the most are behaviours and actions, including certain kinds of speech. A society is something that is probably deserving of moral responsibility and judgement for how it impacts peoples lives. It's part of the environment after all.

Prospects for life elsewhere. The candidates are all pretty far away, however the hope is identifying the characteristics of these types of planets would give us clues as to how to locate them more locally.

Using pattern recognition to identify and treat sick people, is probably a better way to phrase this. Bad is quite the strangest term to apply to an individual. I blame whatever maladaptive family and support culture they came from. Genetics has it's role in determining certain aspects of disposition in life, most individuals of most dispositions, given intervention and guidance can find moral functionalism somewhere in this wide world and wellbeing and security along with that. I don't care what anyone says, I want my surgeons to be at least a little bit sociopathic. Their hands don't shake. Same with dentists, but be punctual, if you are late they can be a little sadistic with even a simple cleaning. Learned that one the hard way! Damn.... I must be a male stripper then... I could probably make it work. I fire spin!

My claim; All bads are wrongs. Not all wrongs are bads. A 5 year old claims; 12+50=71 Wrong, but bad? Clearly mixed up the tens and units column in 12. 5 year old child hits his sister. Wrong, but bad? I have attached a simple logic puzzle, image in attachment. This logic puzzle is a good example of where we are also being asked; How many times do you need to be wrong, before you can be right? Let's add the ethical spin; Let's imagine that each time an incorrect choice is made, a bomb will go off, killing a nearby person standing a safe distance away from the boxes. Now imagine two individuals, they have both been told $1,000,000 is in the box under the produce. One of them has been told that each incorrect box is wired to deadly explosives within killing distance of the people nearby. Let's call them the FI for the forewarned individual and II for the Ignorant individual. They are both told they can walk away at any point and are undergoing the same set up separately. II opens one incorrect box. Is absolutely shocked and just runs away crying tears of shame and guilt. FI opens the minimum number of boxes needed to figure out where the money is, takes the money and leaves the other boxes. Both clearly did something wrong by most objectivist and group-relative standards. Did they both do something bad? A shiny new donkey to anyone who wants to answer the puzzle btw. Don't worry, it won't blow up.

Really like this one actually. Biocentrism for the win.

To live and be life. What else is it supposed to do? I certainly can't be a rock!

Agreed, we can also misinterpret reality. Another way to phrase your point, would be to say that the mind paints a picture of the world. Internal and external. Especially when we speak about the mind. Part of the universe is inside too and the mind has to paint a picture of that. It's kind of like how the more pervasive belief is that we only have 5 sensory systems. When in reality there are 9. 5 for external stimulus, 3 for internal and 1 for both. All that being said, are we going to talk about the mind/body problem or the explanatory gap between how brain states can bring about mind or consciousness? I wonder what Galileo would have made of an EEG, or EM fields in the brain, or even neuronal structures for that matter. I can never shake the feeling that the claim the mind is unobservable is probably wrong. I think we have probably observed it, we just haven't recognised it as such. Proving we have observed it would require that we empirically bridge that explanatory gap. I especially don't like the use of the phrase "Non-Physical". What does that even mean? Sounds like an impossible state of affairs. If the mind exists, it is obviously physical in nature. I think a fair number of individuals have this weird conception of "The Physical" as something solidly observable. Dark matter and dark energy are physical but we can't solidly observe them either and are only aware of their existence due to their effects on gravity and other forms of matter. If the mind truly hasn't already been observed, perhaps it's an exotic form of matter, brought about by yet unexplainable processes of the physics of brains. Maybe it has some kind of non-linear structure? I'm just spitballing of course. None of this is known and I certainly can't think of any experiments we can do to shed light on this. I do believe in the end it will take a very collaborative, interdisciplinary effort to really start to make progress in this riveting field of study. I'm currently putting my money on QM theory of mind or CEMI.

If you can't beat em, join em! Change from within. That's what liberal and centrist gun owners are trying to do. Definitely agree with removing their tax exempt status. One way of expediting that is changing the demographic structure in the NRA until the voices crying out for reason drown out the ones that are crying out for selling fully automatic weapons of war onto civilian streets. What are the older members gonna do? Leave the NRA and start a whites/Republicans only gun group? Please. They'd never get that organisation onto a tax exempt list if they are that unconstitutionally discriminatory.

Regular folk are not a moral monolith. Folk ethics isn't a thing. Neither is cultural relativism. Shock horror, it turns out our moral stances have so much variance they don't even stick specifically to culture or within national borders. How dare they! Something to understand is that all of our explicitly laid out moral theories come from our innate sense of morality, as you would put it. Utilitarianism is only a thing because ethicists and moral philosophers observed and described what was clearly already a part of our moral psychology. People were observed saying and doing very utilitarian things, long before the word "Utilitarianism" was ever in use. I wouldn't use the word innate at all. Young children and babies have undergone what are called Helper/Hinderer Identification experiments and even the youngest children learn to tell the difference between these two character types at a young age. One of those researchers is actually a friend of mine. Their next experiment is to see how children react when the hinderer and helper are the exact same character. Might give us some insight into how our Moral Psychology develops when abused by our parents. It's important to understand that interpreting what these experiments mean is... Difficult. These children couldn't talk so we had to look for non-verbal cues to gauge how they were feeling and reacting to the narrative stimuli. Personally I think this has nothing to do with us being "born with a moral compass" because the youngest babies couldn't tell the difference between help and hinder. What I believe those experiments truly told us, was that Helping and Hindering are two concepts which we learn very quickly. It probably doesn't take babies that long to get an emotional impression of their own helplessness and their parents helpfulness in terms of reducing discomfort and pain in favour of comfort and satisfaction. What you are describing here is what would be considered morally acceptable in Short term Utilitarianism. Long term Utilitarianism does not justify this. A way to flip the switch a little, is to ask if it is moral to harvest a non-reforming, serial rapists organs to save three dying people? However, I think even if the rapist consented, you'd have a hard time convincing the three dying to accept the organs of someone whom they morally despise. So there is that. That discussion evolved into differentiating between these 3 things; Pain, Suffering and harm. Most ethicists and moral philosophers see the reduction of harm as a good we should strive for. Pain and suffering are difficult. Pain is a biological feedback mechanism our bodies need to tell us if something is breaking down or isn't working within our bodies (this means beneficial exercise as well). Suffering can be broken down into justified and unjustified suffering. If you still a beloved pet from me, most would agree my suffering in this instance would be justified. When I steal my own pet back from you, your suffering would be unjustified because most would argue that it's my property and that I haven't stolen anything from you, I've just taken possession of my own pet back. (Ethical arguments about pets are for another day and tangential to this.) Utilitarianism offered a lot of insight into our moral lives and cultivated growth in our moral progress. It's shortcomings are that it takes the depth of our entire human existence and breaks it into a binary dichotomy between Pleasure and Pain. Pain can be constructive, pleasure can be destructive. It's not that Utilitarians don't make some good points, they've just not really caught on to the whole picture and are oversimplifying the complexity of our moral psychology. I think it comes out of a strange need by humans to try to simplify what is clearly a complex existence into binary choices and dichotomies. Pleasure and pain, happiness and harm, good and evil, entertained and bored. Moral theories can be made based on all of these binaries. Doesn't mean they are completely correct or getting into the real meat of the matter. To be extremely clear, our moral theories aren't something we pull out of thin air, more often than not they are just descriptions of thoughts, speech and actions that already exist within animal culture. Not even god was pulled out of thin air in all the supernatural theories of morality. They come from the observation that we as animals have creators. Parents. So some extend that logic onto the universe to say that it too has a parent. It's actually a lot easier than people realise to describe a meta-ethical stance. Do you know how many names I could come up with for the moral claim "most people seem to love kids, so the greatest good we can do is to safeguard the well-being and flourishing of our species by living our lives fulfilling the needs of children, born and umborn." Loads. I even did at one point. That's not the point of this thread though. You wanted some answers as to how utilitarians defend harvesting organs from people against their will to save one life. Most of them don't, short term Utilitarianism isn't worth their time because the defenses employed all seem to fall short of gaining any weight or credibility. Utilitarianism and the rest of Moral Philosophy has moved on. You'll still be taught about it in a class (Especially medical ethics) but you'll probably not get very far if you sincerely subscribe to short term variants of Utilitarianism. Now of course, sometimes decisions like who gets to live and who gets to die are made by medical ethics boards. However, consent plays a very key role and usually the person who is left to die in the worst circumstances is the original ill person, not the innocents whose organs could have been used if they had given consent.

- Mr Miyagi, OG Karate Kid Can we include use of the thick concept "Stupid" as one of those harmful things? We are fallible, this doesn't make us stupid. I'd argue that what makes a person truly stupid, is not realising that each and every one of us fluctuates between moments of intelligence and moments of sheer idiocy. Personally, I am of the belief that every moment is a teachable moment. I can't call your post here completely stupid because it has opened up a dialogue that has the potential of reducing those moments of idiocy we all so enjoy mocking. Now, I'm against most forms of discrimination. Most does not mean all. I do not want a blind person to drive a taxi. I do not want a deaf person in a job where their inability to hear could be a dangerous liability. There is also much to be said for variance in rates of cognitive development. I believe that society is a machine that needs many working parts, not all of those parts are the same. However the machine doesn't work without most of those parts being present. A lot of us don't even realise that a weakness in one context, can be a strength in another. I believe Kreia speaking to Atton in Kotor II puts it quite well. "You could survive where a Jedi could not, simply because you do not feel the force as they do." Sorry, not sorry for the Star wars nerdiness.

Increased odds of survival too. I'd argue that human success as an organism is due in no small part to our ability to adapt, respect and value differences in thought, action and character. Is cultivating diversity over strict conformity not an ideal? Setting ideals is acceptable to me, so long as we are willing to change when any aspect of human societies is or becomes maladaptive to our continued survival, flourishing and well-being. Having an ideal is one thing, the modal quality of the actions we take in order to reach that ideal is where we should really focus our efforts. That does not mean we should not scrutinise every ideals in terms of practically, logistics and possibility. I'm glad you brought up harm; a banker can harm, a baker can harm, a biologist can harm. However this is more down to an individuals moral psychology/moral intent than there being anything inherently wrong with those occupations.

It's meant to seem that way. It wouldn't be a literary paradox otherwise. All Paradox means in this context; an anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas, for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It's a literary device, a dramatic figure of speech, if you will. The problem is actually very carefully worded and my answer is an entirely reachable answer based on only what is there. I left nothing out and no information is missing. In order for it to be a paradox in this sense, since it has been up for over 24 hours and I am now no longer limited to 5 responses a day, it's time to reveal the unexpected insight. Every single person who engages with this problem, chooses to enter into a game played against themselves. In essence, by engaging with the problem, you simultaneously create the same problem. For example: You engage with the Playing with yourself Paradox, the Paradox is solved. Who solved the paradox? In a game of chess with yourself, you've likely already made a decision as to which side will win and which will lose. A part of you plays the role of "winner" and another plays the part of "loser". The loser personality will self sabotage and not make the strongest plays that you, as an individual, would normally make against another individual. The winner personality will make your strongest plays by virtue of knowing exactly what LP is trying to do. This is similar to how we are less likely to be charitable towards views that disagree with our own. If we can never know what is the correct answer, then we become our own referees and decide for ourselves if we have given the correct answer. I'm not competing with anyone here, just myself. The same goes for anyone else whom engages with this puzzle. In a sense, everyone who provided an answer they were confident of, won. Yet they also lost because they were never seriously considering any other answer as valid save their own. I can say, as my answer. The person who won was the part of you that played white. The person who lost was the part of you that played as black. If that is the answer, it provides us with some insight into the topic of personal identity. The claim, that we as individuals can have more than one personality or personal construct within our bodies may have to be taken seriously in this case, at the very least you can't be laughed out of the room for making the claim. I hope this clears some things up. I may have only joined this forum yesterday, I was not born yesterday. Now, individuals here might want to reject my answer offhand. This is encouraged but I'd hope for a reasonably and logically made argument as to why my answer must be rejected. Preferably an argument not made by those with in-group biases who reject it due to my newness on the forum. Pleased to meet you all and I'm grateful to everyone who commented.