fooloso4:
Why is esteeming important?
My answer was that this is the same question as why valuing is important. We do not create valuing or decide not to value. Even if we become indifferent, that is still an evaluative judgment - this is not worthy of value. Valuing, esteeming, is there from the beginning, it is tied to our needs and desires, to what pleases us and causes us pain.
The question was supposed direct attention to the value of esteeming: within esteeming, or anything we do or experience, there is within the analysis,value. All valuing is different in context and themes, just as all reasoning is different to each occasion, but that does not prevent us from identifying as common feature.
I don’t understand the question about the badness of what is bad. Is there such a thing as a “badness” that is not bad? Are you asking if it is bad that it is bad? If the answer is no, then why would we say it is bad? If the answer is yes, then why add the qualification that it is bad? I do not see anything unconditional or absolute about it. It is, rather, a biological or physiological response. A medical procedure may cause pain, which is bad, but this does not mean that performing the procedure is bad if it can restore me to good health. My migraine can range in severity. It might not be so bad or might be really bad.
Bad thinks are obvious,this toothache is bad because it hurts; though we know the pain is good because it tells us to attend to a problem, taken as such, as pain as such, it is simply bad because it hurts, and pain is inherently bad. Nothing inherently bad about a dull knife, though. Hence the argument: you cannot reduce,let's say, pain to contingency. Why? Nothing could be more clear than this. It is bad regardless of how it is placed in a setting, any setting. If something is not contingently bad, yet endures in what it is, it is absolute.
See the argument I made earlier. I think you rather dismissed its essence, which is that value retains it nature regardless of circumstance.
I just do not agree. I cannot think of a case where I would choose to have a migraine, no case in which I would say that it is good that I have a migraine, but this tells me nothing of the “nature” of value, only that I do not value the pain of migraine, or, that it has a negative value. I might, however, wish someone suffer or think it appropriate given the suffering they have caused. In that case, I might say that it good that they have a migraine - "serves him right".
Not sure how this goes. First, served him right? I cannot make sense out of this ethically. Sure, you might say it, but are you suggesting this kind of response would somehow be a defensible idea, pain serving someone right, that is? Second, of course, if you had a choice to have a migraine you could choose to have it in some bizarre hedonic calculation of, say, a child's suffering vs your own. But that is really not the point. The point is that the value inherent in an act is inherently good or bad, not contingently good or bad. Ethical god and bad works like this.
What does its presence tell us? I tells us that this is a moral universe
Does it? Your experiment tells me not to do the experiment because it will cause pain and possibly harm, but that is something I already knew. The fact that I would not hold someone else’s arm to the flame tell me nothing about a moral universe. It does, however, point to something about us. We are social animals who care about and are sympathetic to others. The universe is inhospitable and indifferent to us. We can survive in only a limited environment and even in that environment there are innumerable things that can cause us harm. Moral distinctions are human distinctions, the lines are continually being drawn and redrawn.
But the matter here goes to another level of scrutiny. Here, we look only to pain as such, not the way it presents itself in circumstances. In circumstances we discover value as a feature that needs to be looked at as we might look at a cog in a machine. This is phenomenology, to analyze the structure of experience and disclose its parts. Value is there and it is very different from others structural parts. It is indicative of something within human dasein that is absolute.