wow was that your response? how insecure you must be

look, i never start out making personal attacks, my intention is to debate the points, and you're free to do so, but if you're going to just be a cry baby every time i post, i wont respond to your stupid shit.

Dude! What did you just say? I’m sure you have an important point. I have a good command of the language and know the meanings of all the words in reply. But really with respect that’s gibberish. Could you please try again in English?

Whatever. I just told you like I see it.

Takuan and others will argue the idea, you always throw out how smart you are. I can usually gather the posters intelligence from the content of the posts, not from their assertions of their personal worth.

Like I said, your arrogance detracts from your message.
See ya!

__________________
"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." -- Billy Wilder

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied." -- Otto Von Bismark

okay sure....
what I'm trying to do is set up two ways of looking at things and to them compare and contrast them

the first is the traditional moral/ethical paradigm. You're familiar with it, I'm sure, so I don't have to really explain it.
The second is a new perspective I'd like to offer up to sort of replace morality/ethics.

In ethics there is an appeal to right and wrong. A man stabs another man, he is wrong. Thats sort of how the math works. But to someone like you or myself, who are less charmed by the status quo, that seems like a leap of faith: to assert first an action, and then a moral denotation.
It isn't wrong, in that there is no wrong in this universe, its an intangible human concept.
Instead, I was saying that by having really common place "truisms" or like little tiny statements of fact that we could replace the moral system. I gave the example of the first phrase, "to harm or humiliate others is the worse kind of thing one human can do to another". Now this phrase isn't TRUE, its a truism, a small statement of fact that fits into our modern understanding of the world. As such, we can use these phrases to replace morality. Its more natural, we do it daily. Let me give you an example, "apple a day keeps the doctor away." Now this isn't TRUE, you know, it could be the case that you break your arm after you eat the apple. Instead its just a phrase, with no appeal implied to an ultimate truth. As such, it can be disregarded without a conflict of morality. Christian do this sort of thing all the time. The Bible has the rules, the laws, but then it also has parables, short stories with moral messages that you can take or you can leave.
This is more natural and effective. I myself have no moral code, I don't think murder is always wrong for example. However, by remembering the metaphor, to harm or humiliate another human being is the worst thing I could to them, I'm able to see the potential magnitude of my actions. Whereas if its wrong, whats that make me, a bad guy? I'm going to hell? No, it doesn't mean shit.


this probably didn't help... i dont know this is a hard one to write, when i talk about it I feel like my inflections and style sort of compensate for its unintelligibleness

its funny, i looked over my thread, it doesn't say anywhere that I think I'm smarter than you. you must be really insecure to extrapolate that

I know it's hard. Thanks for trying.

I don't know how something that isn't true can be a truism and a fact? "to harm or humiliate others is the worse kind of thing one human can do to another". Now this phrase isn't TRUE, its a truism, a small statement of fact that fits into our modern understanding of the world."

I have another stumbling point. The fact that you would want to replace a moral code with anything suggests without it there would be a void. "The second is a new perspective I'd like to offer up to sort of replace morality/ethics." If it's useless why replace it with anything?

I'm thinking that if these truisms can be picked up or discarded, like our current moral code, but without the connotation of right and wrong, wouldn't they would be even more useless?

a truism is an assertion of truth within a context. So, that is to say, within the context of science a sun is a flaming ball of gas, whereas in the context of poetry it might be the symbol of eternal love. Within those contexts, particular statements resonate as correct, those are truisms.
they wouldn't be more useless. see, morals aren't there to trick us into acting right. it isn't that they work because they make grandiose claims as to the nature of the universe and of right and wrong. This is why they fail. This is why people are farting around this forum unable to explain where their rights come from, because morals confuse you into thinking their integral, some necessary part of the equation. Instead, teaching the status quo could be done through story telling, via quotes and parables. This is how humans naturally express themselves and educate one another anyways. the appeal to good and bad is an excessive and useless process designed strictly by the western world to create something called moral high ground. its just to make other people look savage.

No one "decides". It is an eternal conflict. For instance, a muderer kills someone. The murder decides that his right is greater than the victim. Now if he never gets caught, then his will wins over the victim, if he gets caught, society can decide whether or not it will impose its will on the murderer. There is no absolute decider.

Okay, I have a better response to this:

Morality is a metaphor for the way we learn to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate action. Its a crap metaphor. The more accurate and useful metaphor is the naturalistic metaphor I am offering, something like story-telling as being the way we learn to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate action. This allows us to see the contingent, dedivinized, aspects of our interpersonal relationships that rest strictly on the way we speak to one another. (Also Occam's Razor)

I agree that it is an ongoing conflict.....

But in the example, isn't society the ultimate authority, provided the offender is caught?

(not absolute in the sense of universal truth, but absolute as authority?)

__________________
"If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." -- Billy Wilder

"Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied." -- Otto Von Bismark