Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

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Eduk
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Eduk »

I still don't know what you are proposing. If accountability seems, to you, not to make sense then please give an example which illustrates this. For example when you drive a car you are accountable for your good driving practices, obtaining a licence, being insured, not being overly tired, not being drunk etc. Now you can say well no one is accountable which is why I was drink driving and my licence shouldn't be taken away? I'm not sure you are saying that though?
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Hereandnow »

Eduk:
still don't know what you are proposing. If accountability seems, to you, not to make sense then please give an example which illustrates this. For example when you drive a car you are accountable for your good driving practices, obtaining a licence, being insured, not being overly tired, not being drunk etc. Now you can say well no one is accountable which is why I was drink driving and my licence shouldn't be taken away? I'm not sure you are saying that though?
In its essence, it's not so grand. It's simply that words like accountability and desert only make sense if you can put burden of the behavior in question on the moral agent. This has to be to be done to make sense of statements like, He deserved to get the celebrity he has because he has worked so hard for it. Well, we don't usually take issue with this kind thing, that is, unless we're trying to ask forbidden philosophical questions that put suspicion where we are more comfortable with routine acceptance. Questioning desert of this kind is never welcome.

But taken as a philosophical issue, it is a major one. For the term does not, on examination, make any sense at all. It is in fact, nonsense. I've put it elsewhere, and here as well: X deserves Y, but why? Hard work begs the question: what motivated this? Where did the confidence to work hard come from? And the talent and intelligence behind the confidence? These are things that need to be understood as being part of a person's sui causa, but they are not, clearly, unless you want go fishing in the sea of metaphysics. They are mere givens, and as such, are morally arbitrary.

I will let it rest at that and let you proceed as you will.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Eduk »

Hereandnow I understand your point, I think, but still what changes if we accept that what you are saying is true. Please give me an example.
From my perspective nothing changes if you are right? I would still hold you accountable if you drove dangerously and take your licence away.
I am struggling for the words to frame this. But we still need to judge it's just that we shouldn't JUDGE. But that's something I already believe irrespective of if you are right or not.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Hereandnow »

Edukl:

Hereandnow I understand your point, I think, but still what changes if we accept that what you are saying is true. Please give me an example.
From my perspective nothing changes if you are right? I would still hold you accountable if you drove dangerously and take your licence away.
I am struggling for the words to frame this. But we still need to judge it's just that we shouldn't JUDGE. But that's something I already believe irrespective of if you are right or not.

right, what does one do with the understanding that there is no accountability, no responsibility, no innocence or guilt, no desert; what do you do with seeing clearly that no one deserves anything, because the terms themselves fall apart on inspection, not unlike words like 'knowledge' and 'belief' and 'material' and 'space' and 'time' and; wait: all concepts fall apart under closer inspection, even 'dog and 'cat'. Tells you something very interesting about being a person that otherwise goes entirely unregarded.

At any rate, that is up to you. I look at this and understand just how massively odd being "here" is. I think of the tonnage of suffering upon which our civilization rests and wonder how it is that, if you will, Being simply threw people into this and there is no narrative to have it make sense.

For me, and it's different for everyone it seems, I just don't buy the idea that whatever it is that is (notwithstanding Heidegger) just tortures itself, as if it were a matter of describing rock strata or analyzing star spectra. This business of suffering is very different. To me moral nihilism is impossible, as impossible as some analytic contradiction. I look to Emanuel Levinas, Husserl, Buber, Kierkegaard, and others to put meaning to this. Think about this enough, and you find yourself at the threshold of what I call religious authenicity.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

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Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2018, 9:41 pmFor me, and it's different for everyone it seems, I just don't buy the idea that whatever it is that is (notwithstanding Heidegger) just tortures itself, as if it were a matter of describing rock strata or analyzing star spectra.
Generally much pain is associated with immaturity, and in that we can find hope.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

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Not clear on that Greta
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Sy Borg »

Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2018, 10:20 pm Not clear on that Greta
Humanity is still very young. Failing annihilation, it should continue the progression that started billions of years ago from nonliving chemicals to life to sensate life to intelligent life and so on.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Hereandnow »

genetic engineering is right around the corner. Inevitable. coupled with AI we will have AI's doing our genetic engineering for us, and the life that issues from this will think the unthinkable. To borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, it is the unknown unknowns that will define the future. Imagine what A Socrates or a Shakespeare would think of a bacterial accounting of infection, or human DNA. I think science is just getting started, so yes, humanity is young: I wonder what they will know 1000 years hence that we cannot even imagine. Can't wait to be reincarnated.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Eduk »

It is interesting that you draw the opposite conclusion to me hereandnow. Where I see a lack of absolutes I think there is a lack of absolutes. Where you see a lack of absolutes you see absolutes.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Belindi »

Hereandnow wrote:
I am not a determinist, because I do not think the world is determined in any way we can imagine. I simply put the matter of desert to the test and see how it fares. Such an analysis does seem to divest moral terms lik accountability, responsibility, desert, innocence, and others of their essential meanings.
It may not be a good idea to jump into a discussion here about what you and I variously mean by 'determinism'.

If you are putting "the matter of desert to the test" from a point of view of eternity or universality, then you are right that your analysis will lose accountability, desert, innocence of their meanings. Those are ideas that can pertain only to human ideas of good and of justice.

However accountability, innocence, and desert are so important for governance of societies that we must be content to catch them and tame them them from our shifting sands of transience and relativity.

Greta is more optimistic than I. She wrote:
Humanity is still very young. Failing annihilation, it should continue the progression that started billions of years ago from nonliving chemicals to life to sensate life to intelligent life and so on.
Burning Ghost wrote, I understand in reply to my claim that Christ's perfection of unselfishness is limited to Jesus Christ and that none of us is JC:
Well, I think we are, because I believe in the "mythos" of the figure rather than the figure itself. It is basically us glorying at our own potential, and being equally inadequate knowing we cannot be "perfect." It is the most perculiar and moving conundrum of the whole human disposition.
I agree although I had not thought of that application of 'mythos'(and thanks for that!). If I may paraphrase what you wrote, man's ability to value and even strive for the unattainable ideal of Christ's perfection is the one saving grace of the human species. I can see why you call this a peculiar and moving conundrum. It's quite a koan really in its mindbogglingness.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Hereandnow »

Eduk
It is interesting that you draw the opposite conclusion to me hereandnow. Where I see a lack of absolutes I think there is a lack of absolutes. Where you see a lack of absolutes you see absolutes.
Ah, I see you understand, but how far will you go with it? Put words like this aside, absolutes and the rest, if you will, and think of different words. I think, and I guess I will never get tired of arguing the point, ethics is first philosophy, and all other such interests are absorbed by this. I believe this because of the one thing that is at the center of our Being in the world, if you will, is the ethical dimension, or, as I put it, the valuative dimension: it is the caring and the suffering and joy that caring is about. What is this, as a theme in ontology, what is this value in Being? A far superior question than what is material substance? or what does it mean for S to know P? It is THE question of our being here, and on this point there is no discussion, I mean, one obviously can, but it is futile. Our caring and the world of mmmm's and ahhh's, this is the only authentic philosophical question. All others are subservient to this.

Given this as an assumption, an axiom, what does this tell us when faced with the proposition of moral nihilism? The business of morality is essentially valuative, that is, in our general affairs, what makes an act, a decision, a judgment ethical is because its focus is on some valuative measure in something. It tells us that our Being here is not a stand alone condition; it is not when defined exhaustively by "the measure of man" (pardon the sexist idiom) sufficient to encompass what it means to be here, and philosophy's object is to explain what it is to be here at the level of basic assumptions.

In sort of cash value terms, I am talking about terrible suffering, a most poignant example of Value in the world. I look at the moral dimension of the concrete realities of the unbearable wretchedness illustrated throughout our Being here; it is not the armchair musing about, snow is white iff snow is white--- it is that child, say, eaten alive by a hungry tiger that is philosophically front and center, and instances like this are far too underrepresented in theoretical priorities.

Anyway, this is not a stand alone condition,meaning, there must be, and we are in metaphysics now, but not deep in contrived narrative, only pointing beyond "accountability" in the dramatically Other embedded in the world of our Being here that makes our world explanatorilly complete. I.e., the failing of words like 'desert' and 'accountability' in our limited vision of disclosure about the world justifies a transcendental argument that supports the assertion that there is something ethically absolute.

Pardon the formal language. Can't be helped.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Hereandnow »

Belindi:
However accountability, innocence, and desert are so important for governance of societies that we must be content to catch them and tame them them from our shifting sands of transience and relativity.
That's not a bad way to put it. No choice really but to assume these ethical concepts have the substance of bonafide fact. But this should not be the end of it. The lack of ethical foundation to an ethical world is what religion is all about, putting aside the story telling and the traditional metaphysics. It tells us that ethical nihilism is an indefensible thesis.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Burning ghost »

Belindi -

Christ, or whoever floats your boat I guess. I'm not Christian myself, but understand the gist wellenough I think.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Gertie »

Hereandnow wrote: March 16th, 2018, 8:42 am
Eduk
It is interesting that you draw the opposite conclusion to me hereandnow. Where I see a lack of absolutes I think there is a lack of absolutes. Where you see a lack of absolutes you see absolutes.
Ah, I see you understand, but how far will you go with it? Put words like this aside, absolutes and the rest, if you will, and think of different words. I think, and I guess I will never get tired of arguing the point, ethics is first philosophy, and all other such interests are absorbed by this. I believe this because of the one thing that is at the center of our Being in the world, if you will, is the ethical dimension, or, as I put it, the valuative dimension: it is the caring and the suffering and joy that caring is about. What is this, as a theme in ontology, what is this value in Being? A far superior question than what is material substance? or what does it mean for S to know P? It is THE question of our being here, and on this point there is no discussion, I mean, one obviously can, but it is futile. Our caring and the world of mmmm's and ahhh's, this is the only authentic philosophical question. All others are subservient to this.

Given this as an assumption, an axiom, what does this tell us when faced with the proposition of moral nihilism? The business of morality is essentially valuative, that is, in our general affairs, what makes an act, a decision, a judgment ethical is because its focus is on some valuative measure in something. It tells us that our Being here is not a stand alone condition; it is not when defined exhaustively by "the measure of man" (pardon the sexist idiom) sufficient to encompass what it means to be here, and philosophy's object is to explain what it is to be here at the level of basic assumptions.

In sort of cash value terms, I am talking about terrible suffering, a most poignant example of Value in the world. I look at the moral dimension of the concrete realities of the unbearable wretchedness illustrated throughout our Being here; it is not the armchair musing about, snow is white iff snow is white--- it is that child, say, eaten alive by a hungry tiger that is philosophically front and center, and instances like this are far too underrepresented in theoretical priorities.

Anyway, this is not a stand alone condition,meaning, there must be, and we are in metaphysics now, but not deep in contrived narrative, only pointing beyond "accountability" in the dramatically Other embedded in the world of our Being here that makes our world explanatorilly complete. I.e., the failing of words like 'desert' and 'accountability' in our limited vision of disclosure about the world justifies a transcendental argument that supports the assertion that there is something ethically absolute.

Pardon the formal language. Can't be helped.
I think a slight shift in terminology can help us get a more secure handle on this.

If we call 'Being' consciousness instead, or 'experiential states', we can readily grasp that Value or Meaning or Morality are naturally concomitant with experiential states, well-being and suffering, our Quality of Life, and subsequent duties to each other - 'Oughts' (played out in politics, social mores, myth, religion, institutions, archetypes, etc).

On the other hand we have models of how the material world works, which doesn't encompass experiential states, value or oughts, and suggests free will, and therefore concepts like accountability and deserving, are illusions. And explains the origin of the particular nature of human values in terms of evolutionary utility.

What we're missing is an understanding of the relationship between the subjective experiential 'realm' of meaning and value, and the objective material 'realm' of stuff and physics. Without that, well we have philosophical attempts at reconciling the two on the one hand (with no consensus in sight), and 'getting on with your life' as if you have choices on the other. Including engaging in politics. And in my opinion the more we understand about the evolutionary origins of our moral predispositions and how they've played out in our history, the better choices we can make. As well as answering simplistic and uninformed assertions about 'natural heirarchies', for example.
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Re: Steve Pinker Lambasts American Left for Political Correctness

Post by Belindi »

Burning Ghost I am surprised by your nonchalant reply.
Christ, or whoever floats your boat I guess. I'm not Christian myself, but understand the gist wellenough I think.
I presumed that you would have been reared like so many of us here with the myth of Christ . I must guess that you are a lot younger than I > Religious imagery is a mystery to my sons and grandchildren. Still, as a philosopher, surely you must recognise it as historical fact that the myth of Christ has been been very influential and popular.

As far as I am aware there is no other mythical icon quite as final as Christ. Fact and fiction certain others are icons of goodness but I don't know any others whose story includes quite so much personal sacrifice as that of Christ. Me, I'm not a Christian as I don't believe that Biblical events are historical events.
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