What is this but a confession that he does not believe in morality and only in "our own values", aka, our self-interest. Or more accurately, that things ought to be done in his interest, since people obviously have widely conflicting interests (a prisoner not wanting to be executed, obviously, vs. his own desire to avoid paying room and board for aforementioned inmate, for example), and you can't reach a decision on what to do unless you chose one faction's interests over others.Animae wrote:You are exactly right on that point, I don’t care the slightest what is right and wrong.douyang wrote: You seem to have missed my point. How can ethics be "pragmatic" or "useful", unless they promote morality? How is this possible if ethics are false and there is no morality they would be needed to support? Unless of course, you never really cared about ethics in the first place so much as inventing a code of rules or values that are designed to serve you and your agenda regardless of their truthfulness or morality.
But you know you already have the solution to the problem right in front of you, solved and ready for application.
Self interest and the introduction of “values” solve all problems in a conceivable way. So what are these values then? If my original intention was to avoid dogmas and the frail “truth” what can I create without possibly being dogmatic? With a bit of creativity I found it quite easy and satisfying to find a solution to yet another problem. What better way is there to avoid something fake that to use something that already exist, moreover it is a dynamic element which takes into consideration the subjective nature of our experiences. These values are our own values!
As they are subjective they are different for every person, which makes my ideas of ethics dynamic instead of universal.
This is one of the major differences, which renders it less useful as it requires a certain degree of knowledge about who you are “putting in the equation”. Unfortunately it makes it useless to use on a massive scale and as I see it useful only for personal application. Fortunately as we all are humans we have similar values thus making it possible to use on just about anybody.
I think this idea is shaping up pretty well, as I created this idea along the course of this thread I consider it to still be in an early stage any constructive criticism is welcome.
See now with what I mean with using our creativity to make something useful?
Anyway no matter what happens with this idea this was a great opportunity to stimulate my creative thinking.
If we use this concept and apply it to the original “problem” in this thread, the conclusion would be that the right way to treat any other entity should be in accordance to its nature.
I personally feel this should disqualify him from having anything meaningful to say on essentially ethical issues such as the death penalty, and many other things, for that matter. What really bugs me about this guy is that he engages in what can only be called a deliberate attempt to confuse the reader, engage in doublespeak, and avoid taking responsibility for his own words and their logical implications. In this post alone he blatantly claims he cares nothing for concepts of right and wrong only to later directly contradict himself by claiming to have found a realistic and "practical" code of ethics. And if you've seen his other posts, you will notice that he always tries to weasel out of being responsible for what he is saying, as Lightice has most likely noticed in the Faith thread. From reading his posts I swear he tries to be deliberately vague and obfuscate what he's really saying and make things needlessly complicated and difficult to understand, contradictory, or off topic so as to imply his point without actually coming out and saying it and being held to account for it. One might write this off as merely being poor attempts at communication and/or fundamental logic, but I have a hard time believing he (or almost anyone) can write the stuff he has by accident rather than deliberation.
If he wants to defend what he has written or explain things more clearly, I am willing to listen a little more. But I seriously want to write him off and ignore him on this forum.