Philosophize this

[SunfallE]

[QUOTE=The13thMan]Alrighty, i like to talk about phiolosophy every now and then with my friend. He's really into it, and i'm arrogant, so we can get into some pretty good arguments every once in a while. It's fun. I figured i'd ask ya guys a question, see what you guys would answer.

Ok, here's the question: If you had the oppotunity to cure all of the world's diseases and hunger, would you do it? Now here's the kicker, you have to sacrafice one person in order to do it. One person's life, taken by you, to save billions. What would you do?

Personally.....i'm not a 100% sure what i'd do. But i'm leaning towards the saving the billions for the one.

It's all about, do the ends justify the means, i believe they do.[/QUOTE][COLOR=DarkOliveGreen]
Ignoring the debate going on here I?m just going to answer the initial post. My answer to this question is I would not sacrifice one to save others. Why? Because this argument is flawed, it is ignoring the fact that cures to diseases are being found and that answers to solving hunger are being addressed. It?s in interesting idea to think that a single sacrifice would save billions but I also think its naive. The chances of anything like that ever happening are highly unlikely. Especially since it?s not likely that the ability to find cures or to find better ways to address hunger are going to end. Progress is always being made. It?s easy to look at current problems and think nothing is being done, but if you look at history then it is obvious that solutions are being found to address hunger and disease.

Also, unless one is presented with the situation, no matter what you say, until it actually happens you really don?t know what you would do. You can hope you would behave a certain way, but you just don?t know. So my hope and belief is that unless I knew for a fact that no cure would ever be found (something I highly doubt) I would not sacrifice anyone.
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[Retribution]

[QUOTE=Derald][FONT=Lucida Console][SIZE=1][COLOR=Sienna]Didn't you read the final segment of my post? I was having an off day, and I just used this thread as a constructive outlet for anger, seeing as it was the first in line when I visited the lounge. I already stated that my normal self would selflessly help another, regardless of whether or not it would harm me.

Please, this is an online philosophy thread - don't take things so seriously.


Also, seeing as this was an insignificant call for attention, it was I who was surprised with you when you simply would not ignore my posts.

Later.[/COLOR][/SIZE][/FONT][/QUOTE]
[size=1]I read the last bit of your post, but the end of your post didn't say anything to counter the "morals are for those who can't accept things how they are," you just said that you'd give yourself. I mean, that's all well and good, but that doesn't necessarily show that you place any value on morals.

Forgive me if I had no idea it just happened to be a call for attention. Forgive me for not ignoring posts that outright blasted everything I held in high regard -- morals, self-sacrifice, and empathy.

This being online had little to no bearing on my views and how I responded to yours.

Good day.[/size]

[Dodeca]

[SIZE=1]I think that some people are taking eachother's comments a [i]little[/i] too personally.

Everybody is entitled to different beliefs, and everyone has the occassional bad-mood-day. My opinions generally don't benefit the majority of the human race when I'm angry either, so...

Though I do hold "morals, self-sacrifice and empathy" in relatively high regard, I see them on a more personal level. My friends matter. The people I see and know matter. Even with the welfare of the entire world relying on my decision, there is no way on Earth I would be able to go through with killing a person, whether I knew them or not - not even if they wanted to sacrifice themselves. In my opinion, saving the world is all well and good, but it wouldn't feel anywhere near as 'real' as the memories of taking someone's life with your own hands. Now, this isn't because of any 'Oh no, I'm going to hell!' views on my part, more of a psychological thing. Face it, there's a hell of a difference between killing one person, and letting nature take its course with billions of people as it has done with humans, and all life, since... well... forever.

On the whole population debate, the only reason that the population keeps increasing is because we've purposefully disconnected ourselves from most of the factors that would stop other animal populations from exceeding certain limits. We've overcome our physical frailty and moved up to the top of the food chain, we've fought anything that opposes us, whether it's disease, physical barriers, or eachother. Heck, we've even fiddled around with our food sources to make them more efficient. It's only [strike]un[/strike]natural that we keep on growing if we make it easier to grow.

-On a side note, who brought war and world peace into this? The original situation was 'disease and hunger'..[/SIZE]

[Farto the Magic]

Please, this is hardly a philisophical question. Its a moral dilemma. I laugh at people who think this is deeply philisophical. How about something more...difficult to grasp?

Is virtue its own reward?
Are humans naturally rational?
What makes a chair a chair? What is the essence of chairness?
What makes a dog different than a cat?

Dudes. I'm in a college philosophy class right now. These are the topics at hand.

[Fasteriskhead]

Oh, a [I]college philosophy class[/I], eh? I guess the rest of us should hang it up, then. Ladies and gentlemen, shall we stop our discussion? The sir wishes to tell us what a syllogism is.

Seriously though, as much as I find these kinds of hypothetical dilemmas somewhat silly, insofar as philosophy has traditionally been divided into logic, physics, and ethics* that kind of question (typically set out as "if you do not perform immoral action x, undesirable consequence y will result") would pretty clearly find a comfortable place in the third category without any difficulty. Moral dilemmas, whatever I may think of their [I]worth[/I], have been a part of the tradition from Plato onwards. On the other hand, if you'd like to propose a way for us to fruitfully discuss the essential being of things or the meaning of human rationality, I'm all ears and I don't think anyone else would object in the least. (Because, honestly, we might have just about exhausted this first topic by now)


* Being the loser that I am, I can't let this go without noting that these words, in their original Greek formulations of logos, physis, and ethos, originally meant a heck of a lot more than they do as we take them today. Although another question still is whether any Greek thinking, from Pythagoras on up to Wittgenstein, has ever been able to think of these things, especially ethics, in the correct way (i.e. in a way representative of their essential truth). I'm not up for answering this one today, folks.

[Farto the Magic]

[QUOTE]Oh, a college philosophy class, eh? I guess the rest of us should hang it up, then. Ladies and gentlemen, shall we stop our discussion? The sir wishes to tell us what a syllogism is.[/QUOTE]

I meant no offense. I just figured that the current question was already beaten down and had descended into a verbal arguement involving everyone ganging up on someone who has differing views on...everything. I did figure though that if anyone would care to discuss more difficult questions, this would be the thread to do it on. But, if you insist on making me out to be an arrogant prat, go on. I won't stop you. On the other hand, if you want to continue with the philosophy, I could keep conjuring stuff up.

So, since you apparently deemed the last questions too easy for you to immerse yourself in, and would rather deface me than answer these, its apparent that you don't care or don't know. Ah well, I couldn't claim to know these either. Socrates did say "True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing."

If anyone else has anything constructive to bring to the conversation, by all means...

[Fasteriskhead]

I apologize, that was out of place. And I will take your "arrogant prat" comment to heart, since at least being thought an egotistical set of hindquarters means I'm not being [i]totally[/i] ignored. However, I would wonder if a person who calls a moral dilemma "hardly a philisophical ([i]sic[/i]) question" on the basis that he is "in a college philosophy class right now" (and thus apparently knows better than us) has yet been taught in that class about a logical fallacy usually called [url="http://changingminds.org/disciplines/argument/fallacies/appeal_authority.htm"]"the appeal to authority."[/url]

And as a matter of courtesy if nothing else, please pay attention to the portions of people's posts (e.g. "...if you'd like to propose a way for us to fruitfully discuss the essential being of things or the meaning of human rationality, I'm all ears and I don't think anyone else would object in the least.") that are [i]not[/i] cheap insults that said poster shouldn't have made. At the very least, this should keep you from, for example, accusing them of deeming "the last questions [about essence, rationality etc.] too easy for [them] to immerse [themselves] in" and declaring that they "don't care or don't know" about those questions.

And by the way, that Socrates quote, which I believe is borrowed from somewhere in the Apology (he says it a couple of times, as I recall; I'll go check the original text later), is frequently misunderstood, or at least taken out of context. He's not at all saying, "We can never know anything for sure!" then sitting in place and plugging his ears because mankind can never learn. This is how it's usually taken and is to completely miss the point, and plus it's simply contrary to any everyday experience (I KNOW how to drive, for example). For Socrates, human beings do not have [i]true[/i] wisdom, despite anything else they may know - this has to do with the Platonic seperation of essence from existence, which I won't go into. True wisdom, for Socrates, is only possible for God, and is thus something beyond mortals. But what makes human beings [i]unique[/i], especially the highest of human beings (i.e. the philosophers), is their ability to [i]know[/i] that they don't have this kind of wisdom. That is, they are dimly [i]aware[/i] of "how things really are," essentially [i]connected [/i]somehow to the wise, even though they themselves cannot hold it. Far from throwing him into apathy (which is, again, how people who use the quote typically mean it), knowing that he doesn't know puts Socrates on the [i]quest[/i] to find true wisdom. He chases after wisdom, makes that chase for wisdom the sole meaning for his life - hence the name [i]philosophia[/i], the love of wisdom. Thus for Socrates, knowing that you don't know, properly understood, is exactly the opposite of a reason to give up: it is to fully understand for the first time the purpose of human life, that is, to seek after true wisdom.

I will repeat what I said in my previous post, the one which didn't have "anything constructive to bring to the conversation," albeit in a clearer way: if you have some way for us to begin talking about one of these questions you pose (I'm not asking for an answer, I'm asking for a way to [i]start the process of thinking about the question[/i]), then I ask you to start us off on it. The questions, as they stand, seem so wide-ranging that I feel like my arbitrarily starting somewhere would probably miss the point of what you're getting at with them. Plus, frankly, I'd probably start in on phenomenology or something if you gave me free reign on them, and we'd all be lost like two sentences in.

~~~~

Welp, you've had a little less than a week and haven't started us out yet. That being the case, I'll see if I can begin tackling your questions myself, although this probably isn't a good idea.

Ultimately two of your questions, "What makes a chair a chair? What is the essence of chairness?" and "What makes a dog different than a cat?" are asking about the same thing. They ask about the essential nature of things. More properly, they ask about being ([i]essential[/i] is related to the Latin [i]est[/i]: when we ask about essence we literally ask about the is-ness of something). This is not some new issue: the question of the being of particular things has been one of most important questions of philosophy, possibly [i]the[/i] defining issue. Philosophy seeks for the ground which allows things to settle into their nature. Throughout history, thinkers have continually asked: "What is essential to this thing? How is it that this thing is what it is, instead of being something else entirely or something nonexistent? Why is there anything at all rather than simply nothing?" Or, if you prefer: how is it that we can ever say of a thing that "it is"? I dare not rattle off a quick answer and expect to solve the whole issue; it's perhaps more worthwhile to briefly go into how the essence of things has been thought throughout history, and see if that tells us anything.

Current Anglo-American philosophy conceives being in terms of how language is used and in terms of metaphysics. Bertrand Russell, talking about the essence of chairs, might formulate it like this: "There is only one type of object with the list of qualities A, and chairs are this type of object. Object X has all of the qualities in list A, therefore X is a chair." In other words, a chair is a chair because it conforms to a number of qualities that chairs have. For example: we can sit in it; it has a back that can support our weight if we lean backwards; it has legs of some kind to support the seat. We can even extend this kind of thinking to [i]particular[/i] chairs - we might say, for example, "There is only one chair that Fasteriskhead is sitting in right now, and [i]this[/i] chair, chair X, is that chair." Only recently has this notion of essence become a problem. Kripke, [i]pace[/i] Russell, might say that while chair X is in fact the chair I am sitting in, this did not [i]necessarily[/i] have to be the case. I could be sitting in an entirely different chair, and yet despite this chair X still remains chair X. Better: there is something [i]essential[/i] to chair X that makes it what it is even if it is no longer the chair that I'm sitting in, or lacks any number of other qualities.

Kripke proposes (and I'm barely making a caricature of his idea here) that the referencing of a particular thing by us should not depend on a list of qualities that thing has, but is instead accomplished by a widespread agreement (by way of a kind of dissemination) among a large group of people that a certain thing is what it is. That is, chair X, even if it somehow turns out that it's not the chair that I'm sitting in, necessarily remains what it is. This sense of "agreement," though arrived at in a different way, is actually not all that different from what Wittgenstein proposes as far as how we "know" things, e.g. how I "know" that a tree is a tree. For Wittgenstein, my knowing that a chair is a chair is not reliant on some kind of special transcendent wisdom that I have about chairs, but is only because the status of the chair is obvious, that is to say, I don't doubt it. Or more precisely, I [i]can't[/i] doubt it. I can imagine, for example, "mistaking" a very good picture for a real chair if I don't have my glasses on, but I cannot imagine the chair that I sit in every day being anything but a chair. This is [i]not[/i] because that could never turn out to be the case, but only because I fundamentally cannot [i]doubt[/i] that it's a real chair; its status as a chair is as deeply entrenched in my conception of the world as my name or the fact that the earth existed before I was born. These things I learned long ago and I take them for granted, i.e. they ground my world as it is; surely I can speculate about other things, but these speculations always have to have an un-doubtable ground which is only justified by my saying "I know it's so because I know." Doubting things like my chair's chairness fundamentally means that there's [i]nothing that can't be doubted[/i], which makes absolutely no sense in our everyday lives and our everyday use of "language games." Wittgenstein's take on how we approach certainty can be summed up by saying that if I were to walk by someone in a store who pointed out a chair and said, "Maybe that's not a chair," I would think he was nuts. It's not that it's not [i]possible[/i], but such ponderings have no place in our usual conversations about things (because those conversations are precisely what are [i]grounded[/i] by our assumptions about how things are).

Both Kripke and Wittgenstein point to how we think about essence nowadays, but we can go further back to get a clearer idea of what's new about this. Arbitrarily, let's start with Augustine, because I think if I went any earlier we'd be here all day. For Augustine, things attain what they are by being [i]created[/i], that is, by being formed by God. Things in themselves are dry husks without the presence of God which allows them at each moment to achieve their essence; there's a wonderful passage in the Confessions where he imagines the world as a sponge, which soaks up the essential substance which is God and thereby achieves its full nature. The later medieval scholars thought in much the same terms: in order for us to be able to say of something that "it is," that thing must conform to the divine will. We sum this up by saying: the chair is a chair because God wills it.

Descartes was the first to truly begin to shake this up: starting from the assumption that the [i]appearances[/i] of things do not necessarily represent what they truly are, he found that, though he could always say of the "appearance" of a thing that it might be something else or might not exist at all, the one thing that remained constant was that [i]there was something capable of experiencing and doubting these appearances[/i], and that something was himself. Being, no matter how distorted its appearance, is always confirmed by way of my being able to experience it, hence the infamous [i]cogito[/i], "Because I think, I must be." Or, better: my thinking is the confirmation that there is anything at all. Descartes, for his part, also grounded his "thinking thing" (i.e. himself) in the reality of God, who as an infinite being acts as the foundation for my own thinking (this part usually gets forgotten). For Descartes, in order to find the essence of the chair, which is "guaranteed" by its relationship to the God whom I am aware of, I must clear away the mere outward appearance of the chair by way of rational investigation in order to discover the chair's matter.

The important thing to note in all this is that, for the first time since the Greeks, essence is now thought of as tied up in cognition, which is at the very least the [i]confirmation[/i] of essence (if not essence itself). In other words, it always takes a thinking thing to be able to say "it is" (haw haw, and [i]you[/i] thought that this idea was NEW when quantum physics dropped it). Anyways, skipping Spinoza and some of the others, Berkeley is the one for whom cognition becomes even more important. Berkeley rejects the split that Descartes makes between the appearance of a thing and its essence; for Berkeley, all that is can be said to be ideas perceived by the mind in sense experience. In other words, what we perceive is [i]already real[/i]; the essence of a thing is its presence in experience. There [i]is[/i] an external world outside of human perception, but this world is, once again, ideas which are conceived and held in the mind of God, and not any kind of unseen self-existent "matter" which somehow causes my sense experiences to happen. For Berkeley, there is no chair or chair essence outside of how the chair immediately shows itself in sense experience; the chair presenting itself to me in that moment IS its essence.

Hume extends and radicalizes what Berkeley's doing, but Kant is the one who truly makes the break. Kant takes to heart the Berkelian objection that all we can know and say is real is our immediate perceptions, and uses this to flip the usual materialist conception on its head. Our conscious perceptions, rather than conforming itself more or less to what is "really out there" (still believed by most), instead does exactly the opposite: what we perceive is [i]made[/i] to conform to the transcendental structures of our consciousness. Thus, for Kant, even if we can't know what may be out there beyond our sense perceptions, we [i]can[/i] understand the fundamental structures of our own consciousness, and, thus, how it is that we can come to experience anything at all. Kant, then, would not see any possibility in discovering a "chair-in-itself," but would find HOW it is that we are first able to say "the chair is..." in the nature of human subjectivity. For Kant, subjectivity is what grounds a thing's being.

After Kant, things grow increasingly frantic. For Schelling and Schopenhauer, the ground of being is will; for Hegel, it becomes the dialectical self-movement of consciousness; for Marx, it is human labor; for Nietzsche, it is the will to power; for Husserl, it is intentionality (I can't go into any of these too deeply). What's important to note is that after Kant, the essence which grounds things is increasingly thought of in terms of my subjective experience of them as objects; that is, I'm able to say "it is" of something because I perceive it. "Man is the measure of all things," Protagoras declared: the ground of being is now thought in terms of the human experience of the world. This returns us to Kripke and Wittgenstein. Human being as the ground is true of Wittgenstein too: a human being is the only one who can say, "That's a chair." But Wittgenstein has something else going on: I don't perceive the chair as a chair just because it [i]is[/i], or because I will it. No: I have LEARNED what a chair is, I was told what it was as I was growing up, and I will never think otherwise unless heavily persuaded (i.e. bullied).

Now that we've begun to think of being as dependent on human experience/perception, not only philosophy but the [i]sciences[/i] have begun to investigate what it is that fundamentally makes up (that is, grounds) what a human being is. Thus, if we were to ask an educated person on the street why they thought a chair was a chair, assuming they took the question seriously they would probably report, "Because that's how I've always thought," "Because I was raised to think that." The chair appears to us as a chair, that is, it IS a chair. But we now begin to think of our perception of the chair as being determined by some external force outside of our consciousness: societal influence, genetic factors, memories stored in the brain. Man is the measure, but he now finds [i]himself[/i] calculated, examined, and determined. We now understand, thanks to psychology and the behavioral sciences, that we need not necessarily perceive the world in the way we do, and that were culture/neurochemistry/whatever different the entire totality of things that are would be altered or dismantled. Why is a chair a chair? No reason at all, save for this external force which has told me that it is.

In other words, for modernity the essential ground of things, including my own perception, is never anything except [i]authority[/i]. And authority, moreover, only conceives meaning in terms of usefulness and utility. Thus, the chair being a chair (that is, my perceiving it as a chair) is only ever the case because it is [i]useful[/i], and in turn I as a being am only I because I am useful to my genes, to society, to the economy, to my CNS, etc., which are all driven by greed and the pleasure principle. The chair is there as a tool for performing a number of useful tasks, and the same goes for the earth, for my family, for my own body. Any "perceptions" I have of particular beings are entirely arbitrary and meaningless except for how they may be useful for external, alien forces which I can barely identify, let alone control. This, in a nutshell, is how modern thinking considers essence nowadays: the chair is a chair because it's useful as a thing for me to sit in (just as I am useful for... etc.), or the chair is a chair because some authority outside of myself has arbitrarily told me that it is, and it has no meaning beyond that.

The only question now left to be answered is whether physics, biology, information technology, culture, religious law, global economics, or something else will ultimately decide the final usefulness of things; even now they all butt heads and mark out their territory. Fundamentally, though, usefulness and authority have won: the truth of this should be self-evident. There is no way out that can't be explained in terms of a move into just another structure of naked power and brute authority... unless, perhaps, another possibility entirely exists. It's possible, I think, that we [i]still[/i] haven't caught on to the truth of what being is and what brings things into what they are, though it's difficult to see how we might begin to move in that direction. If such a possibility does exist, and indeed we can smell it on the horizon, then there may still be hope for things such as love (outside of the propagation of the species and the spread of genes), art (outside of creating advantageous moods for laborers), and justice (outside of the maintenance of a beneficent social order). There may even be room for something as simple as knowing what a chair is - though this may be too much to hope for.

[color=DarkGreen][font=Trebuchet MS]Fasteriskhead, as double posting is against OB's rules I've had to merge your two consecutive posts. If you have something to add, but no one else has yet posted, use the EDIT button in the bottom-right of your post, instead of posting twice in a row.
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