What is Good?

[Ex-California]

I think that both Habits and Proper can be viewed as bad.

For example, what is Proper behavior for a Fundamentalist Muslim woman is incompatible with Western Civilization.

[Martin Hash]

Dictionary.com again:

Natural Law - a principle or body of laws considered as derived from nature, right reason, or religion and as ethically binding in human society.


STOP THE SOPHISTRY

[Martin Hash]

I think that both Habits and Proper can be viewed as bad.

For example, what is Proper behavior for a Fundamentalist Muslim woman is incompatible with Western Civilization.

See, an objective statement.

[Ex-California]

I think that both Habits and Proper can be viewed as bad.

For example, what is Proper behavior for a Fundamentalist Muslim woman is incompatible with Western Civilization.

See, an objective statement.

Yeah you're right, I just tried to write a response and it went circular

[Speaker to Animals]

"Natural Law" is also mysticism.

No, it's not. You just don't know what it means.

???
Okay, I'm a Martian who just landed on planet earth, stuck my flag in the ground, popped one of my pseudoeggs which I use for reproduction into my mouth for food, and you showed up. Explain "Natural Law."

Reason applied to human nature.

[Martin Hash]

I think that both Habits and Proper can be viewed as bad.

For example, what is Proper behavior for a Fundamentalist Muslim woman is incompatible with Western Civilization.

See, an objective statement.

Yeah you're right, I just tried to write a response and it went circular

Actually, you used the exact logic I will to deduce the word "good." (Obviously, it's objectively relative.)

[C-Mag]

Fucking BroGrump beat me to it!

[LVH2]

If you want, you can use natural law in the place of God, or the Greek Logos, but you need *something* that justifies an act as morally righteous. Otherwise, you are justifying acts based on your subjective feelings, which really just leads you towards the degeneracy of the left. Eventually you will decide some form of dialectic is the best people can arrive at as a collectively agreed upon justification.

Ancient philosophers had no aversion to dialectic. That's how most of them arrived at their conclusions for what is good. Without some kind of exploration, you have divine command theory. Even if true, you have no access to the divine commands unless God speaks to you directly (and you somehow know you are not crazy). So you are just picking a book of rules at random and hoping it is right. And if God's will is not based on reason, then it too is arbitrary. If it is based on reason, then we can reason towards it and have no other way to access it.

Their answers varied but tended to be like what you described. One idea is that we are products of nature, so that it is good to act in accordance to nature and our nature. Our nature being mainly characterized by reason.

Another angle is that the good is that which promotes an individual human flourishing and happiness (in the big sense). Epicurus argued that happiness or pleasure is THE good and was strictly speaking, a hedonist. However, he wasn't talking about pursuing shallow pleasures. Even in his time, I feel he got a bad rap. Seneca would quote him endlessly, with great approval, and then condemn him.

One popular key to happiness is freedom from desire and particularly, the desire to control things you can not control. If you can be happy sitting in jail, and I can only be happy if I have $10,000,000, then it seems you are better off.

Alexander to Diogenes: You may ask anything you want of me.

Diogenes: Get out of my sun.

It's good for everyone if we pursue our own happiness in this way, because when we are happy, flourishing, properly functioning people, we are good to be around and good for society.

It is better for our happiness to coincide with the happiness of others, rather than the unhappiness of others, because this is win/win/win/win/win/win instead of win/lose/lose/lose/lose/lose.

Anyway, there's my crash course in virtue ethics, which I think is the best approach to the question.

But then I'm a degenerate, rather than a beacon of virtue like Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Newt, Pat, etc. etc.

[heydaralon]

If you want, you can use natural law in the place of God, or the Greek Logos, but you need *something* that justifies an act as morally righteous. Otherwise, you are justifying acts based on your subjective feelings, which really just leads you towards the degeneracy of the left. Eventually you will decide some form of dialectic is the best people can arrive at as a collectively agreed upon justification.

Ancient philosophers had no aversion to dialectic. That's how most of them arrived at their conclusions for what is good. Without some kind of exploration, you have divine command theory. Even if true, you have no access to the divine commands unless God speaks to you directly (and you somehow know you are not crazy). So you are just picking a book of rules at random and hoping it is right. And if God's will is not based on reason, then it too is arbitrary. If it is based on reason, then we can reason towards it and have no other way to access it.

Their answers varied but tended to be like what you described. One idea is that we are products of nature, so that it is good to act in accordance to nature and our nature. Our nature being mainly characterized by reason.

Another angle is that the good is that which promotes an individual human flourishing and happiness (in the big sense). Epicurus argued that happiness or pleasure is THE good and was strictly speaking, a hedonist. However, he wasn't talking about pursuing shallow pleasures. Even in his time, I feel he got a bad rap. Seneca would quote him endlessly, with great approval, and then condemn him.

One popular key to happiness is freedom from desire and particularly, the desire to control things you can not control. If you can be happy sitting in jail, and I can only be happy if I have $10,000,000, then it seems you are better off.

Alexander to Diogenes: You may ask anything you want of me.

Diogenes: Get out of my sun.

It's good for everyone if we pursue our own happiness in this way, because when we are happy, flourishing, properly functioning people, we are good to be around and good for society.

It is better for our happiness to coincide with the happiness of others, rather than the unhappiness of others, because this is win/win/win/win/win/win instead of win/lose/lose/lose/lose/lose.

Anyway, there's my crash course in virtue ethics, which I think is the best approach to the question.

But then I'm a degenerate, rather than a beacon of virtue like Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard, Newt, Pat, etc. etc.

I've never heard the divine command theory term before. You make a good point about arbitrary rules. But using dialectic or reason to try to determine what is good hardly fixes the problem. Everyone has a picture in their head of what a good world is, and this picture is different inside every individual mind. In order to reason, and discuss, you still have to start with assumptions, because in order to end somewhere mentally, you have to begin somewhere. So all these philosopher types made their own assumptions the same way that a guy saying God spoke with him directly did. Sure, the discussion might reduce your assumptions, but in my opinion you run into the same problem. Your worldview still ends up being random, because even though it appears that you logically arrived at a conclusion, there is still the initial randomness of why you value certain things more than others. It either stems from your personality, or your culture or upbringing. There isn't really a good solution imo. Most of these discussions get weird and end up boiling down to word games and definitions. Anyway, I'm starting to sound like some kind of postmodernist fag so sorry about that.

A lot of dudes way smarter than us have written these tomes on why this system is better than others. Many have made convincing arguments, but fundamentally all of them are arbitrary. The idea of being guided by reason is not really ever practiced in my opinion. Even things we seem to intuitively value now like democracy, equality, freedom etc are relatively recent and were not associated with good. For instance, humility, one of the most emphasized values of Christianity and one that I put a lot of stock in, would not be valued by someone like Aristotle. He would think it was pathetic.

We always think of the Greeks as being these hyper-rational people, but they were just as swayed by religious motives as the Christians who followed them. Socrates is viewed as the main dialectic dude, but he started with plenty of arbitrary assumptions. For one thing, he did believe he talked directly to god, and actually went catatonic in for a full day during the battle of Potidea. He felt that he was on a mission from Apollo to force the city of Athens to look at itself in a mirror and correct its ills. Nowadays, such thinking seems antiquated, but the secular humanism that is so revered in today's academia also make assumptions about what is good based on rules which ultimately derived from Christianity. Its all sort of arbitrary if you think about it.

[SuburbanFarmer]

What is most good is making life better for those around you. Serving the tribe and your fellow human. Your nature is to care and share with a tribe. Follow it, and you’ll be happy.

The Buddhists and Christians both nailed this perfectly, millennia ago. If you follow the philosophy, without the dogma, you have a pretty good roadmap.