What is Good?

[Martin Hash]

That’s what an Altruist thinks but not a Conscientious person.

[Hastur]

I was working on a theory I call Liberty Binaryism, and was trying to come up with the root word for “good” (verses bad). As you can see below, all of these words are circularly defined, a breeding ground of subjectivity and fuzzy thinking. (From Dictionary.com)

Good - moral righteousness.

Morals - principles or habits with respect to right or wrong conduct.

Principles - guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct

Right - in accordance with what is good, proper, or just.

Just - based on right

Wrong - not in accordance with what is morally right or good.

Bad - morally reprehensible.

Maybe a similar term?

Ethics - a system of moral principles:

However, there are some words in the definitions that carry a modicum of objectivity.

Habits - customary practice.

Proper - conforming to established standards of behavior or manners.

I think I can work up from those.

Add Truth to the list. The quest for truth is the root of Good. Propagation of lies is the path to Evil.

[K@th]

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.

Nice post.

[LVH2]

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.

1)

2) I'll agree to a degree. I don't think there is one discoverable moral truth and, like much of philosophy, these things can reduce to word games especially as you enter into pedantry. But one appeal of virtue ethics is that it doesn't, for the most part, require that you get a perfect answer for everything. If you confront 15 elderly people, your best friend and a baby about to go over a waterfall and can only save one, what do you do? We don't need an answer from virtue ethics, though we might get somethings to consider. The important thing is that you'll act out of good motivations and subsequently be able to deal with the experience.

I also think some things like your upbringing, culture and even your individual needs can play a role in which kind of ethical thinking helps you to function best. But, I do think we need some. Lots of bad stuff seems to happen when we have none. But, I guess, you could point to many examples of people devoted to believe systems with a moral underpinning who have done the worst things ever. But that's another reason I like virtue ethics. It requires a lot more perverting to arrive at, "it's OK for me to torture and kill these people because they are on the bad team." Aren't many Buddhist terrorists or inquisitions. To my knowledge, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc did not read Seneca and Aristotle every day and, if they did, they must have disagreed with most of what they read.

If we focus more on ourselves, and less on others, I do think we can use the assistance of others to make progress. What we think of as the pure, uncut Socrates proceeded mostly by dismantling things and I think we can do that with our own thoughts.

So, while it might not ultimately be grounded in an axiom or a scientific fact, we can, for example examine our fears and try to alleviate them.

We probably need to agree about what things make a person happy and what types of people we want to be. But say, we look at a millionaire who is always complaining and upset and who is paranoid about losing the money and has no good relationships Then we look at those people you sometimes meet who seem pretty bright but hold a lower station in life and who seem very happy. (There's this woman who works at Earl of Sandwich who is a minor role model for me). Which of these people would we like to be like?

If you say the paranoid, bitter millionaire, and cannot be swayed from that view, then maybe the discussion is over. I can't PROVE that he is not leading the good life in the way I can prove that the earth is flat, or that Bush did 9/11.

But I can say that for me and a lot of others, really diving into this stuff makes you more satisfied with life, less afraid of death, etc. I actually just been through some shit. Nobody died, but I had a lot of money stolen from me. Much of it was money I was holding for other people. The whole scenario was really weird and I wasn't sure they'd believe me. 10 years ago, I would have been a total wreck. Now, I was just a partial wreck.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Wouldn’t mind some details on that story... sounds interesting.

[heydaralon]

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.

1)

2) I'll agree to a degree. I don't think there is one discoverable moral truth and, like much of philosophy, these things can reduce to word games especially as you enter into pedantry. But one appeal of virtue ethics is that it doesn't, for the most part, require that you get a perfect answer for everything. If you confront 15 elderly people, your best friend and a baby about to go over a waterfall and can only save one, what do you do? We don't need an answer from virtue ethics, though we might get somethings to consider. The important thing is that you'll act out of good motivations and subsequently be able to deal with the experience.

I also think some things like your upbringing, culture and even your individual needs can play a role in which kind of ethical thinking helps you to function best. But, I do think we need some. Lots of bad stuff seems to happen when we have none. But, I guess, you could point to many examples of people devoted to believe systems with a moral underpinning who have done the worst things ever. But that's another reason I like virtue ethics. It requires a lot more perverting to arrive at, "it's OK for me to torture and kill these people because they are on the bad team." Aren't many Buddhist terrorists or inquisitions. To my knowledge, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc did not read Seneca and Aristotle every day and, if they did, they must have disagreed with most of what they read.

If we focus more on ourselves, and less on others, I do think we can use the assistance of others to make progress. What we think of as the pure, uncut Socrates proceeded mostly by dismantling things and I think we can do that with our own thoughts.

So, while it might not ultimately be grounded in an axiom or a scientific fact, we can, for example examine our fears and try to alleviate them.

We probably need to agree about what things make a person happy and what types of people we want to be. But say, we look at a millionaire who is always complaining and upset and who is paranoid about losing the money and has no good relationships Then we look at those people you sometimes meet who seem pretty bright but hold a lower station in life and who seem very happy. (There's this woman who works at Earl of Sandwich who is a minor role model for me). Which of these people would we like to be like?

If you say the paranoid, bitter millionaire, and cannot be swayed from that view, then maybe the discussion is over. I can't PROVE that he is not leading the good life in the way I can prove that the earth is flat, or that Bush did 9/11.

But I can say that for me and a lot of others, really diving into this stuff makes you more satisfied with life, less afraid of death, etc. I actually just been through some shit. Nobody died, but I had a lot of money stolen from me. Much of it was money I was holding for other people. The whole scenario was really weird and I wasn't sure they'd believe me. 10 years ago, I would have been a total wreck. Now, I was just a partial wreck.

Good post! I wish you posted on this forum more

[heydaralon]

Wouldn’t mind some details on that story... sounds interesting.

The Socrates one?


There are a lot of skeleton's in ol' Socrates closet. One of the other between the lines aspects of his trial was that he had introduced more gods to Athens. People did this all the time, but if you were an asshole or sacrilegious about it they would go after you though usually not as bad as Socrates. Anyway, his oracle or what have you whispering in his ear was what caused Socrates to behave like an obnoxious asshole when he would question important people non stop. It was his driving force, according to Socrates. When he served with Alcibiades during the Peloponnesian War at Poitdea, the messages or visions from the oracle were so intense that socrates just sat there not talking or moving for an entire day. This thing had a huge impact of his life and philosophy, which is crazy because that means that modern philosophy is sort of built on this somewhat insane man who would have been Baker Acted today if he said that a messenger from god told him to argue with all of the famous and important people of the present day. All of Socrates' humble brag's about himself that he was the smartest man because he admitted he knew nothing were things the oracle told him, I believe. If this oracle was real, it gave him some praise that turned him into a grade-A douchebag.


Anyway, I don't even know if you were asking about my Socrates story or something else. I love talking about Socrates, that crazy old pedophile lool

[LVH2]

Thank you Kath and Hey. I wish Kath posted more too. I assume Ookie is done? To bad. Was fun to debate someone who wasn't a brick wall of confirmation bias. Hey, were you always this funny? Laughing at a lot of your stuff. Reminds me of some of the evil Irony Bros I know on twitter. Please share more of Socrates' skeletons.

I'm just too busy to post really. If I work 7 days a week, work out, meditate and read that takes up everything. I'm just falling into some bad habits cuz of losing all my money. Plus, I sort of missed ya all and had been meaning to touch base.

I can tell the story of me being robbed at somepoint. I could use some outside evaluations from smart people. It's a long story though. Short version is, money has been dissapearing for months. In increasing amounts. I thought I was screwing up my accounting, as I might have $8k when I thought I should have 9. I thought I was losing my mind. But eventually it became evident that someone has been breaking in (without breaking the lock) and just scooping up some, but not all of my cash. Really crazy.

Anyway, there have been some really good posts on what we were discussing. How to arrive at normative moral claims, or what is good. How to integrate science and other knowledge into normative claims. How to go from, this is what you are to this is what you ought to do. This is in a discussion of a book that proposes to update stoicism for our time.

https://howtobeastoic.wordpress.com/201 ... ts-part-1/


“Following nature means following the facts. It means getting the facts about the physical and social world we inhabit, and the facts about our situation in it — our own powers, relationships, limitations, possibilities, motives, intentions, and endeavors — before we deliberate about normative matters. It means facing those facts — accepting them for exactly what they are, no more and no less — before we draw normative conclusions from them. It means doing ethics from the facts — constructing normative propositions a posteriori. It means adjusting those normative propositions to fit changes in the facts."
....

That is why Stoics reject universal moral approaches, like deontological or utilitarian ones, and why the answer to any sensible moral question is always going to be: it depends (on the particulars of the case). The fact that someone may be dissatisfied with such “messiness” is a reflection of their own state of mind, not of the world as it actually is.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Stop letting hookers sleep over.

And stop holding loose cash in your house. Shouldn’t it be in a safe, at least? Maybe on hold at a casino?

[Speaker to Animals]

Wouldn’t mind some details on that story... sounds interesting.

The Socrates one?


There are a lot of skeleton's in ol' Socrates closet. One of the other between the lines aspects of his trial was that he had introduced more gods to Athens. People did this all the time, but if you were an asshole or sacrilegious about it they would go after you though usually not as bad as Socrates. Anyway, his oracle or what have you whispering in his ear was what caused Socrates to behave like an obnoxious asshole when he would question important people non stop. It was his driving force, according to Socrates. When he served with Alcibiades during the Peloponnesian War at Poitdea, the messages or visions from the oracle were so intense that socrates just sat there not talking or moving for an entire day. This thing had a huge impact of his life and philosophy, which is crazy because that means that modern philosophy is sort of built on this somewhat insane man who would have been Baker Acted today if he said that a messenger from god told him to argue with all of the famous and important people of the present day. All of Socrates' humble brag's about himself that he was the smartest man because he admitted he knew nothing were things the oracle told him, I believe. If this oracle was real, it gave him some praise that turned him into a grade-A douchebag.


Anyway, I don't even know if you were asking about my Socrates story or something else. I love talking about Socrates, that crazy old pedophile lool

Yeah, but he was pretty tame by comparison to others. Athenians didn't kill Diogenes pupil Crates and that guy was far worse.Crates' nickname was "The Door Opener" because he would walk into random people's homes and berate them about their poor life choices.