Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Socrateaze
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Socrateaze »

Hereandnow wrote: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.
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?

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.
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-1-
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

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Hereandnow wrote: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.
A tough issue. Any takers?
Not a tough issue if you think of the law of the excluded middle.

"Nothing can both be and not be a the same time and in the same respect." You talked of table top statue which at one point is a door stop, and at another point is a deadly weapon to crush skulls of people with. (Agatha Christiesque, but more palatable than torturing children.)

So the table top statue does not go through a value transformation. Instead, like you said, I think you said that, the circumstances of the object create a new value for it. Different circumstances for different values.

There are no absolutes in values in the sense you brought up.

Why the "badness" of torture does not go away is because you are not a sadist. Or a masochist. Otherwise it would.

We are approaching the subject with an empirical mind set: "we found an exception, so it must be such-and-such." Until the exception is proven incorrect (like the child-torture thing not becoming "good" seemed to be solid thinking, until the sadism of the torturer was revealed, or the masochism of the child was revealed) the proposition stays.

This is tiresome, because one has to constantly be on the look out for undefeatably "bad" values, and another must be on the lookout why these are actually still "defeatable". I'd rather see a general, all-encompassing theory or opinion which settles the problem without needing to DEPEND on individual examples for the validity of the claim. Such none exists, so I pull out of this.

There you are.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

Socrateaze:
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?

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.
Sorry, I have to recover from shock to respond. Did you really say torture is not so bad for one minute? This is actually part of my point. See above where i mentioned how we bring value into regions of contingency and then we start treating them like other things that fit unproblematically, like dull and sharp knives. In other words how we are so accustomed tossing language about, as in pass the salt and what a pity congress can't pass anything, and what a lovely day it is, that we fail to see the nature of the value involved itself. As heidegger out it, ontology is most near, and yet the farthest from us. Such insight requires inquiry into something that is not worn on the sleeve of everydayness. We have to look closely to see that value, any value is GOOD or BAD intrinsically, noncontingently. The little joys in life, the getting home on time when you thought you'd be late, the thrill of driving your new car, and so on--these are ubiquitous--possess each of them, an absolute quality in that the joy, the taste, thrill as such is never cancelled out, never to be cancelled out. Same goes for suffering.

So, I recommend that you take a busen burner and run it under your forearm for 10 seconds and and tell me suffering for a minute is not so bad. Then get back to me.

What makes children so special? First, they are free of the interpretative base that would help them put their suffering into some meaningful context, and this makes for a very important insight: We are all children in this regard, for we are thrown into this world (See, if you like, Kierkegaard's existential crisis in Sickness unto Death where he raises the issue of the alienation from the the world as such) from where, is where and why and the like, these are absent. If we free ourselves of all the presuppositions "always already there" in each perceptual moment, we too are like, if you will, "knowing children." But anyway, it is also the beauty of an unfettered mind, free of corruption that time brings,a dn this is innocence and it is the innocence that is so appalling to a moral thinking person. But again, we are innocent, too, we adults.

-- Updated July 28th, 2017, 2:08 pm to add the following --

That is to say, "....and it is innocence, the violation of which is so appalling....."

-- Updated July 28th, 2017, 11:11 pm to add the following --

-1-:
This is tiresome, because one has to constantly be on the look out for undefeatably "bad" values, and another must be on the lookout why these are actually still "defeatable". I'd rather see a general, all-encompassing theory or opinion which settles the problem without needing to DEPEND on individual examples for the validity of the claim. Such none exists, so I pull out of this.

There you are.
Apologies, but I'm not there at all. But since you pulled out I won't waste energy on clarification. But then, if you have a genuine interest, let me know.
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Ranvier
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Ranvier »

The pain resulting from a torture may seem absolute regardless of the context. However, life is a torture, in spite of the moments of pleasure. Would anyone voluntarily forgo the torture? Some people do in suicide but what if the torture was the only means to understand, as in a child knowing not to touch the red hot stove but finally understands upon the sensation of pain.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Hereandnow »

Depends, Ranvier, on who one is. My thoughts go to those who live in little but suffering rather than to yours or mine. Ours are of little interest philosophically because a great deal of it is living in the comfort of believing and having our beliefs confirmed when we say, pass the salt and my, what a lovely day. My interests go with the cases that tear this, if you will, body of narratives apart. That is when things get very weird because we are called upon to explain a world that is, to borrow from Sartre, radically contingent: capable of anything, beyond the prevailing norms of understanding. Terrible suffering (as well as unspeakable joy. Both "transcend," that is, go beyond the narratives of everyday living. Suffering is more poignant, though; makes a stronger impression for most of us. But then, this is not true for all) reminds us that the world we live in is not the world at all.

So, the understanding you speak of: in the case of the one born into wretchedness to die the same, what knowledge redeems this? Forgo this? Absolutely. But this is not the point. The point is, WHAT is it doing there int he first place? It's being there, what does this tell us about the world we are in? It tells us that it is not any of these narratives. It is much, much more than this. Value confers upon the world a wholly new dimension of Being.
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Ranvier
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Re: Value: the invisible ruler of our world

Post by Ranvier »

Hereandnow wrote: "... what knowledge redeems this?
I don't think that anyone can answer such question with certainty, one can only speculate about the possibility in perspicuity of realization, in pain and suffering, about the color of one's soul.

-- Updated September 4th, 2017, 11:35 am to add the following --
"Value confers upon the world a wholly new dimension of Being."
The value... in pleasure of the youth and the pain of suffering in aging and death. We are all privileged.
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