Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Hereandnow
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Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

What is ethical and aesthetic value? The experience of this kind of thing is clear: it's simply the hurts and pleasures, the horrors and joys of the world. But value in its analysis is much more mysterious than this. I came across the issue some time ago reading Alasdair MacIntyre, John Mackie and Wittgenstein, and it goes like this: shove a spear in my side, and the pain is beyond doubt, but what is it that makes pain "bad" (and joy good, for that matter)? Not as easy to understand as it seems.

Take a Wittgenstein-like construction wherein our ideas are bound up in bundles of contingency. For example: this knife is dull, so it's a bad knife; but then, no: it will be used for a performance of Macbeth, and we don't want anyone to get hurt. Ahh, I see. Then it's a good knife after all. How is it that the good of the knife changes so immediately? The answer is that it is the same as with all that we say and do: meaning that meanings yield to the circumstances. This transformation is a common thing in our everyday lives. Take a desk top statue-- hold a door open with it, now it's a door stop. Stanley Fish wrote a paper titled "Is There a Text on This Class" which highlights the malleability of the meanings of words, demonstrating that the concept of 'text' needs context to have its meaning presented at all. Words are embedded in contexts and language possibilities, and are not fixed and absolute.

But notice how this works with value. In the Wittgenstienesque example above, the knife's goodness being bound up in sharpness is entirely lost. There is nothing of it being "good and sharp" that carries over into the context of the performance of Macbeth. In fact, sharp becomes bad! But does this work with value propositions?

Extreme examples are the most poignant. Consider that you are faced with an ultimatum such that you must either torture a single child for 10 seconds or, just for the sake of making a clear case of it, if you refuse, an entire world of children would be horribly tortured for an eternity. The decision to torture the single child is, based on very compelling utilitarian thinking, obviously the preferred one. BUT NOTICE: unlike the sharpness of the knife,which gets completely turned around when considering the alternative terms of contingency, here, the "badness" of torturing of a child does not, if you will, just go away. It remains. And there is nothing you can do to think it away; there is no alternative set of circumstances that can change our judgment that the 10 second torture is bad.

This is, in my thinking, a stunning piece of reasoning and I would invite you to disabuse me on the conclusion I come to, which is that the reason why the "badness" of the torture does not go away is because value is absolute. Not that our value judgments are absolute, given the admixture of value and culture and language, that is, how embedded the pains and joys of the world are int he circuitry of our lives and institutions of thoughts and feelings; but that taken in and of itself, the ethical and aesthetic good and bad removed from the endlessly changing conditions of contingency, there is a simplicity that is powerfully clear that underlies all of our moral thinking.

A tough issue. Any takers?
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Commonsense2 »

A tough issue, yes. And certainly well-presented. I am lacking an argument to dissuade you from your claims. In fact, I too subscribe to the belief that value judgments are not absolute.

However, that is where our beliefs seem to diverge. I say value is not absolute. It depends on context.

I take pain as an exemplar. Pain is bad as a means to relax, yet pain is good as a warning system to alert one of damage or danger.

Some attributes of a warning system might be: swiftness, localization, intensity, etc. If pain has value as a warning system, it must possess the attributes of swiftness, localization, intensity, and all the rest. This is what makes pain a good system to alert one of damage or danger.

Likewise, joys and pleasures, hurts and horrors, and other experiences can be good or bad, depending on contextual framework.

In my view, value is not value if it is without context. Thereby, value and value judgments are intertwined. Value’s context must be interpreted by a judge. That is to say that a judgment must be made. A priori, value judgments are not absolute, given the synthesis of value, culture and language.

To my way of thinking, for a thing to have value it must be a member of a class, that class must contain attributes, and the class member must possess the attributes of the class. The value of a thing must be assessed by the attributes it owns in comparison to the attributes of its class. That assessment is made by a judge, who is, of course, influenced by cultural tastes and nuances of language.

I ask you if it were otherwise, of what practical value would value be?
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

Commonsense2:
I take pain as an exemplar. Pain is bad as a means to relax, yet pain is good as a warning system to alert one of damage or danger.

Some attributes of a warning system might be: swiftness, localization, intensity, etc. If pain has value as a warning system, it must possess the attributes of swiftness, localization, intensity, and all the rest. This is what makes pain a good system to alert one of damage or danger.

Likewise, joys and pleasures, hurts and horrors, and other experiences can be good or bad, depending on contextual framework.

In my view, value is not value if it is without context. Thereby, value and value judgments are intertwined. Value’s context must be interpreted by a judge. That is to say that a judgment must be made. A priori, value judgments are not absolute, given the synthesis of value, culture and language.

To my way of thinking, for a thing to have value it must be a member of a class, that class must contain attributes, and the class member must possess the attributes of the class. The value of a thing must be assessed by the attributes it owns in comparison to the attributes of its class. That assessment is made by a judge, who is, of course, influenced by cultural tastes and nuances of language.

I ask you if it were otherwise, of what practical value would value be?
Can you not think of a color of a sound as it is, out of context? Granted, hermenuetics tells us that all of our ideas are conditioned by context ( I guess you could put it this way); that there is no innocent eye. But when attention moves directly upon a thing, like the color green, there is no failure to acknowledge it as green as such, as if our complex thinking mind, while bound to language and "difference" to make a singular affirmation, has the ability, notwithstanding, to recognize things "as they are themselves". The yellow of this banana is undeniably singular even though I may be a egoic center of massive conceptual cognitive complexity. the same goes for all things, I think: thoughts, memories, perceptual impressions or percepts-- all can be, once attention is moved out of some everyday concern, taken up in consciousness singularly.

Not only does value,the pain in my speared side, possess the same singularity, it does this with greater distinction. I know you are right to say that bad things can have good ends, like avoiding danger and so forth, but that is not what i am arguing here. I am saying, as unwilling as you might be, put aside thoughts of use, context, and just make the matter about the pain itself, its presence; indeed, when you are in such pain, you are hardly thinking about such things and attention is entirely fixated on the pain. Here is where the intuition of pain, the pain qua pain becomes a distinct object. Now the pain is a given; it is not a contrivance of language and culture. I am not looking at the value of value in use. I'm just looking at the noncontingency of value as such. value judgments like "you need to study to pass the exam" justify pain, and they work just fine. But what, if you will, justifies pain being part of the possibilities built into being itself? Why does being, thrust into existence (so to speak) then 13 billion years later start to torture itself through the agency of, well, us?

-- Updated July 19th, 2017, 7:47 pm to add the following --

that's "color OR a sound" above
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Spectrum »

I do not believe there are ontological absolutes, i.e. absolutely absolutes independent of the human conditions.

I agree with the OP 'Value: the invisible ruler of our world.'

The study of values is Axiology.

For morality to be effective we must start with absolutes values, i.e. relative absolutes that are extracted from the empirical. This is necessary because we need fixed goalposts, i.e. absolute moral laws as guides [not as enforceable laws].

Based on the empirical and evolutionary traits, pain is generally to be avoided and pleasure is to be sought after.
To act as moral guides we should impute the above with a degree of absoluteness, i.e.

1. Pain is to be avoided absolutely and
2. Pleasure is to be absolutely sought after.

The above [empirically based] are to be used within morality as the default and guides only.

But in practice we understand there are circumstances where one has to face pain, e.g. pain of a needle during medical treatments.
To cater for the above we have to prepare a rough guide and assign values [ratings and degrees] of pains that are to be avoided.
For example any pains that are like to lead to premature death would be rated say 99.999% [given there is no perfection] degree of avoidance.
The pains of the exposure to the Sun and risk of sunburn during work may be rated at 10%.

The same listing can be prepared for pleasure in its various contexts and circumstances.

My point is we need to absolute moral laws and values [9.999%] and complement such absoluteness with variations in values in relation to various contexts and circumstances. The absolutes and the relative must work in complementarity like Yin and Yang.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Spectrum:

I do not believe there are ontological absolutes, i.e. absolutely absolutes independent of the human conditions.


I would agree with you if the matter were about "grass is green" or " it looks like rain' kind of propositions. I think pragmatists like Rorty and his progenitors Heidegger and Wittgenstein are often right, but it's not that I abide by all they say. The concepts available in our possible discourses are temporal instruments of problem solving. But for me, the game changer is the "presence" of things, the intuited "presencing" (we are, after all, time; not in time, but are time)--even though they are there embedded in our pragmatic understanding, they assert themselves from outside our conceptual "sameness" as Levinas would put it. The presence of things exceeds our interpretative containment; presence is, in the language of Sartre, radically contingent, that is, a superfluous abundance that will not be contained or managed. I cannot say that language grasps presence in the way it grasps and controls our pragmatic world; but it is utterly profound to realize that presence is intrinsically valuative, and value, the horrors and blisses of the 'presencing" of the world, affirm powerful meanings beyond the pale of conceptual analysis.
My point is we need to absolute moral laws and values [9.999%] and complement such absoluteness with variations in values in relation to various contexts and circumstances. The absolutes and the relative must work in complementarity like Yin and Yang.
Not clear on this. I read it as a contradiction affirming and denying absolutes, but I could be off on this.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Commonsense2 »

Hereandnow wrote:
Can you not think of a color of a sound as it is, out of context? Granted, hermenuetics tells us that all of our ideas are conditioned by context ( I guess you could put it this way); that there is no innocent eye. But when attention moves directly upon a thing, like the color green, there is no failure to acknowledge it as green as such, as if our complex thinking mind, while bound to language and "difference" to make a singular affirmation, has the ability, notwithstanding, to recognize things "as they are themselves". The yellow of this banana is undeniably singular even though I may be a egoic center of massive conceptual cognitive complexity. the same goes for all things, I think: thoughts, memories, perceptual impressions or percepts-- all can be, once attention is moved out of some everyday concern, taken up in consciousness singularly.

Not only does value,the pain in my speared side, possess the same singularity, it does this with greater distinction. I know you are right to say that bad things can have good ends, like avoiding danger and so forth, but that is not what i am arguing here. I am saying, as unwilling as you might be, put aside thoughts of use, context, and just make the matter about the pain itself, its presence; indeed, when you are in such pain, you are hardly thinking about such things and attention is entirely fixated on the pain. Here is where the intuition of pain, the pain qua pain becomes a distinct object. Now the pain is a given; it is not a contrivance of language and culture. I am not looking at the value of value in use. I'm just looking at the noncontingency of value as such. value judgments like "you need to study to pass the exam" justify pain, and they work just fine. But what, if you will, justifies pain being part of the possibilities built into being itself? Why does being, thrust into existence (so to speak) then 13 billion years later start to torture itself through the agency of, well, us?

-- Updated July 19th, 2017, 7:47 pm to add the following --

that's "color OR a sound" above
Well said, and convincingly from my (former) point of view.

I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by "Why does being, thrust into existence (so to speak) then 13 billion years later start to torture itself through the agency of, well, us?" Please expound or clarify.
.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Spectrum »

Hereandnow wrote:Spectrum:

I do not believe there are ontological absolutes, i.e. absolutely absolutes independent of the human conditions.


I would agree with you if the matter were about "grass is green" or " it looks like rain' kind of propositions. I think pragmatists like Rorty and his progenitors Heidegger and Wittgenstein are often right, but it's not that I abide by all they say. The concepts available in our possible discourses are temporal instruments of problem solving. But for me, the game changer is the "presence" of things, the intuited "presencing" (we are, after all, time; not in time, but are time)--even though they are there embedded in our pragmatic understanding, they assert themselves from outside our conceptual "sameness" as Levinas would put it. The presence of things exceeds our interpretative containment; presence is, in the language of Sartre, radically contingent, that is, a superfluous abundance that will not be contained or managed. I cannot say that language grasps presence in the way it grasps and controls our pragmatic world; but it is utterly profound to realize that presence is intrinsically valuative, and value, the horrors and blisses of the 'presencing" of the world, affirm powerful meanings beyond the pale of conceptual analysis.
'presencing" of the world, affirm powerful meanings beyond the pale of conceptual analysis.
I understand you are presenting that 'presencing' as 'this' or 'that' that is beyond words. I can agree to a limited extent within certain perspective as long as you are not reifying 'presencing' in any way.
Whatever it is, my point is, this [whatever] is ultimately grounded on human psychology.
Spectrum wrote:My point is we need to absolute moral laws and values [9.999%] and complement such absoluteness with variations in values in relation to various contexts and circumstances. The absolutes and the relative must work in complementarity like Yin and Yang.
Not clear on this. I read it as a contradiction affirming and denying absolutes, but I could be off on this.
Like Yin and Yang the relative and the absolute [not ontological] must work in complementarity to generate synergy and optimality.

Not sure if you are familiar with the Zero Defects concept in the Business World and various other organizations.
Consistent Zero Defect is a concept of Perfection which is impossible in the commercial world and in practice anywhere.
But despite it is an impossibility, some business organizations still establish Zero Defect as a mission and vision of the organization.

Note this example;
VISION
To enable the advancement of Indian industry to a position of eminence in the global marketplace and leverage India’s emergence as the world’s supplier through the ‘Made in India’ mark.

MISSION
To develop and implement a ‘ZED’ culture in India based on the principles of:

Zero Defect (focus on customer)

Zero non-conformance/non-compliance
Zero waste

Zero Effect (focus on society)

Zero air pollution/liquid discharge (ZLD)/solid waste
Zero wastage of natural resources

https://zed.org.in/vision-mission
The above Vision and Mission of an organization driven by Zero Defects [quite impossible] sounds very crazy.
In reality the payoff is great in terms of profitability and the organization bottom line.

In practice the concept of Zero Defect [as an absolute] is merely a guide.

The above guide has to work in complementarity with another set [hierarchy] of relative values.

It is the same for Morality and Ethics based on values. The Framework and System involved must incorporate the complementarity of absolute and relative values.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

Spectrum:
I understand you are presenting that 'presencing' as 'this' or 'that' that is beyond words. I can agree to a limited extent within certain perspective as long as you are not reifying 'presencing' in any way.
In fact, I hold that in the presence of things as we encounter them, puts human awareness at a critical threshold of understanding what is real. The question of Being as such intimates an extraordinary break between every day knowing and the nature of Being.

As to the reference to business practices and their ideals, it is a bit out of range in this issue. Sure, it is common that our ideas about zero problems in any affair is just a guideline. Closer to my thinking, you could take this as an indication of the nature of our concepts. every concept is an ideal. the thing in the table is a 'pen' but this is just a guideline, a tool for anticipating and familiarizing us with the world. With actual pens (things that adhere to the schematic in our heads) we "know," that knowledge is not *about* the presence we encounter, but the preestablished (Heidegger would say preontological) body of possible encounters always already there, in the waiting. Some would call this Being, this body of always-already there possibilities, our Being, that is. this is what we are, this center of possible carrying forth language and culture, and not "presence" at all. I.e., there is no soul, no transcendental ego apparent to analysis.

This is right, save the part where the transcendental ego is played out of existence. i think this former IS existence; the transcendental ego is our Being.

-- Updated July 21st, 2017, 1:13 pm to add the following --
Commonsense :

I'm not sure that I understand what you mean by "Why does being, thrust into existence (so to speak) then 13 billion years later start to torture itself through the agency of, well, us?" Please expound or clarify.
I am just playing off the Big Bang theory in order to remove our thought from the more familiar theorizing toward a time when Being was not differentiated, like at the moment of the big bang. It is a way to move from the complexity of moral thinking, which is involved and messy, and toward an isolation of the issue: it's not this or that moral problem, it's the very presence of moral problems as such, and morality is grounded in a very strange kind of "behavior" of Being which is value. It's one thing to talk about black hoes, particle physics, genetics, and so on. The stuff of the world remains stuff with a trajectory, a mass, a distance between other stuff, a spin, even quantum nature. Value, caring, suffering, joy: what ARE these? Two worlds, on ethe scientist's world, the other the same, but there is value,: these are very different places, and atoms and molecules are very different things.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Spectrum »

Hereandnow wrote:Spectrum:
I understand you are presenting that 'presencing' as 'this' or 'that' that is beyond words. I can agree to a limited extent within certain perspective as long as you are not reifying 'presencing' in any way.
In fact, I hold that in the presence of things as we encounter them, puts human awareness at a critical threshold of understanding what is real. The question of Being as such intimates an extraordinary break between every day knowing and the nature of Being.

As to the reference to business practices and their ideals, it is a bit out of range in this issue. Sure, it is common that our ideas about zero problems in any affair is just a guideline. Closer to my thinking, you could take this as an indication of the nature of our concepts. every concept is an ideal. the thing in the table is a 'pen' but this is just a guideline, a tool for anticipating and familiarizing us with the world. With actual pens (things that adhere to the schematic in our heads) we "know," that knowledge is not *about* the presence we encounter, but the preestablished (Heidegger would say preontological) body of possible encounters always already there, in the waiting. Some would call this Being, this body of always-already there possibilities, our Being, that is. this is what we are, this center of possible carrying forth language and culture, and not "presence" at all. I.e., there is no soul, no transcendental ego apparent to analysis.

This is right, save the part where the transcendental ego is played out of existence. i think this former IS existence; the transcendental ego is our Being.
I am not sure how to reconcile with your views.

The bottom line with 'Being' is these;
  • 1. Being - as a reified Being, God and the likes
    2. Being - not reified.
Thus as long as you do not take Being as reified I am with you. It is just a matter of reconciling the non-reified Being in its various perspective.

As with an actual pen, I am with Kant on there is no pen-in-itself.
There exists a concept of 'pen' in the mind, but whatever is 'pen' as a reality, it is a spontaneous-emergent-pen resulting from a combination of the pen as a concept with various other matters of the brain and the collective.
There is no independent 'pen' awaiting out there to be perceived by humans.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Spectrum:
Thus as long as you do not take Being as reified I am with you. It is just a matter of reconciling the non-reified Being in its various perspective.

As with an actual pen, I am with Kant on there is no pen-in-itself.
There exists a concept of 'pen' in the mind, but whatever is 'pen' as a reality, it is a spontaneous-emergent-pen resulting from a combination of the pen as a concept with various other matters of the brain and the collective.
There is no independent 'pen' awaiting out there to be perceived by humans.
I think at that threshold, there is an alienation from the world we know. Very interesting if one can put Kant down and pick up Husserl. See his phenomenological reduction.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Spectrum »

Hereandnow wrote:Spectrum:
Thus as long as you do not take Being as reified I am with you. It is just a matter of reconciling the non-reified Being in its various perspective.

As with an actual pen, I am with Kant on there is no pen-in-itself.
There exists a concept of 'pen' in the mind, but whatever is 'pen' as a reality, it is a spontaneous-emergent-pen resulting from a combination of the pen as a concept with various other matters of the brain and the collective.
There is no independent 'pen' awaiting out there to be perceived by humans.
I think at that threshold, there is an alienation from the world we know. Very interesting if one can put Kant down and pick up Husserl. See his phenomenological reduction.
Don't discount the possibility that Husserl could likely have a very active zombie meme subliminally driving his philosophy.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Hereandnow wrote:.... there is a simplicity that is powerfully clear that underlies all of our moral thinking.

A tough issue. Any takers?
It's very simple. You are talking about conscience. Conscience makes morality clear and simple. Without conscience, if one must reason it out, naturally it will be anything but clear and simple.

This is why people should be trying to figure out how to strengthen conscience in themselves, or get it at all if it isn't there at all in the first place, rather than trying to figure out what is 'right' and 'wrong'.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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I pretty much agree. I am something of an intuitionist on the matter of understanding the difference between moral acts and others. Take John Rawls' Justice as Fairness. Although he concludes as I do that those at the top of wealth and power are the most obliged to help the least advantaged, he approaches this as a self-interest motivated affair. I say, it isnot self interest that is at the heart of moral decision making, it's knowing it hurts and caring, i.e., conscience, compassion, empathy: these go to the individual, the agency of morality, not the utility and not the principle (though these are no to be dismissed).
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Hereandnow wrote:What is ethical and aesthetic value? The experience of this kind of thing is clear: it's simply the hurts and pleasures, the horrors and joys of the world. But value in its analysis is much more mysterious than this. I came across the issue some time ago reading Alasdair MacIntyre, John Mackie and Wittgenstein, and it goes like this: shove a spear in my side, and the pain is beyond doubt, but what is it that makes pain "bad" (and joy good, for that matter)? Not as easy to understand as it seems.

Take a Wittgenstein-like construction wherein our ideas are bound up in bundles of contingency. For example: this knife is dull, so it's a bad knife; but then, no: it will be used for a performance of Macbeth, and we don't want anyone to get hurt. Ahh, I see. Then it's a good knife after all. How is it that the good of the knife changes so immediately? The answer is that it is the same as with all that we say and do: meaning that meanings yield to the circumstances. This transformation is a common thing in our everyday lives. Take a desk top statue-- hold a door open with it, now it's a door stop. Stanley Fish wrote a paper titled "Is There a Text on This Class" which highlights the malleability of the meanings of words, demonstrating that the concept of 'text' needs context to have its meaning presented at all. Words are embedded in contexts and language possibilities, and are not fixed and absolute.

But notice how this works with value. In the Wittgenstienesque example above, the knife's goodness being bound up in sharpness is entirely lost. There is nothing of it being "good and sharp" that carries over into the context of the performance of Macbeth. In fact, sharp becomes bad! But does this work with value propositions?

Extreme examples are the most poignant. Consider that you are faced with an ultimatum such that you must either torture a single child for 10 seconds or, just for the sake of making a clear case of it, if you refuse, an entire world of children would be horribly tortured for an eternity. The decision to torture the single child is, based on very compelling utilitarian thinking, obviously the preferred one. BUT NOTICE: unlike the sharpness of the knife,which gets completely turned around when considering the alternative terms of contingency, here, the "badness" of torturing of a child does not, if you will, just go away. It remains. And there is nothing you can do to think it away; there is no alternative set of circumstances that can change our judgment that the 10 second torture is bad.

This is, in my thinking, a stunning piece of reasoning and I would invite you to disabuse me on the conclusion I come to, which is that the reason why the "badness" of the torture does not go away is because value is absolute. Not that our value judgments are absolute, given the admixture of value and culture and language, that is, how embedded the pains and joys of the world are int he circuitry of our lives and institutions of thoughts and feelings; but that taken in and of itself, the ethical and aesthetic good and bad removed from the endlessly changing conditions of contingency, there is a simplicity that is powerfully clear that underlies all of our moral thinking.

A tough issue. Any takers?
This may be solved with one word, self-interest. You speak of a child, being tortured for the sake of the children of the world. Suppose the one doing the torturing has no children. There may be no more self-interest than, perhaps, the notion of duty to society. But, what if it was your child you had to torture for the other nameless and faceless children? Would you still do it?

The same goes for the knife being sharp or not. Again it is a matter of self-interest. It is sharp for those we don't like and blunt for those we do/play with. So the question arises, is value based on how it affects us personally? Sacrifice is easy when we are not connected with those whose lot we have to decide.

The same goes for a sharp knife for vegetables, it is a self-serving matter, no knife is good if it squashes the vegies instead of cutting them, but then you might give a blunt knife to a kook you'd like to spite.

The rest is just wordplay, semantics. Good, may mean efficient or suitable, for whatever purpose. If it suites us, it's good, no matter whether it is sharp or blunt. It really is all about us and how we value things. In fact, a blunt knife sometimes is a better weapon, because it does more damage.
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

Socrateaze:
This may be solved with one word, self-interest. You speak of a child, being tortured for the sake of the children of the world. Suppose the one doing the torturing has no children. There may be no more self-interest than, perhaps, the notion of duty to society. But, what if it was your child you had to torture for the other nameless and faceless children? Would you still do it?

The same goes for the knife being sharp or not. Again it is a matter of self-interest. It is sharp for those we don't like and blunt for those we do/play with. So the question arises, is value based on how it affects us personally? Sacrifice is easy when we are not connected with those whose lot we have to decide.

The same goes for a sharp knife for vegetables, it is a self-serving matter, no knife is good if it squashes the vegies instead of cutting them, but then you might give a blunt knife to a kook you'd like to spite.

The rest is just wordplay, semantics. Good, may mean efficient or suitable, for whatever purpose. If it suites us, it's good, no matter whether it is sharp or blunt. It really is all about us and how we value things. In fact, a blunt knife sometimes is a better weapon, because it does more damage.
No, it's not just word play, but through words, it is an attempt to show something all too real. Consider the concrete example: a man down the street is given an ultimatum: torture this one child for a minute or, says a lunatic villain, I will torture a whole community of children till they scream for death. Or something like that. Now in issues laid out in hypothetical constructions: "If....then.....," you find things like "If you want to stay dry, then you should bring an umbrella." Meanings work like this and nothing is fixed. It takes us, a community of interpreters to fit words, and their use-value, into this and that context. Meanings are malleable, they are contingent; we need to know a context as a precondition to understanding what is being said. This should be very clear.

I am saying that the 'badness' of the torture endures in any conceivable context; even more, I am saying that all value is like this. If you contextualize value, put it in circumstances where one value trumps another, and this is the way of it always, it seems. And this is important: Value is brought into context and it becomes just like other meanings; it is relativised, as in, work harder to impress the boss, the former contingent upon the latter.

Inside a given region of contingency, values malleable things. But outside, considered as they are themselves, that is, the pleasure of food, of socializing and so on taken out contexts that would compromise their value, food weighed against proper diet, for example; this is where the the matter gets, frankly, weird. Take a copy of Moby Dick and hold a door open with it, it becomes a door stop; but the torture retains its, to use that awkward term, "badness" and their is no context that can undermine this. There may be great utility in choosing the lesser of evils, but the evil remains evil no matter. Evil is an absolute, therefore. And this is what relion is really all about: the absoluteness of value.
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