So you're saying we provide the context? But again isn't that subjective/self-serving? I understand what you mean that things need context and that some can change, but some stay grim like your child-torture example. However, I've always wanted to know, why are children more special than adults? I know this may be off topic, but why is it preferable to torture an adult over a child?Hereandnow wrote:Socrateaze:
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.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.
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.
Further more, I don't think it is SO bad to torture one child for a minute to save the world's children from eternal agony. Kinds are stronger than we think, they can survive many things, I certainly have.