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Moral clarity.

Gadfly

Crusader
In no way I read this does it make sense. The unjust ruler wishes to execute a person, but with some semblance of legality. So he wishes to have a written statement condemning the accused. He threatens death, to a person if they do not provide written testimony condemning the accused. Under what semblance of legality would he put to death the person that refuses to condemn the innocent?

The unjust ruler would have to create a law, to be seen for it to be a legal execution, of those that did not supply affidavits at his command.

No matter which way you look at it, the ruler is not doing anything under any semblance of legality.

It is a dictator telling his people to do or die.

Of course the overall question only changes slightly, would you lay your life down for the innocent?

TAJ is making up moral thought experiments. These sort of things usually do NOT occur in real life. They might occasionally. In truth, such things can only occur in very oppressive environments or regimes, where totalitarian leaders carry out any nutty order at their whim.

It is like those "what if there were three men on a boat, it was leaking, and they could make it to shore only if there were only TWO men . . . . so, how to decide WHO should be thrown overboard"?

This thought experiment thing is used quite a bit as a tool to "envision" various possibilities and realities. Einstein did it with science. As I recall, Kant did it at times with philosophy. Granted, often the scenarios are not any that we would or could ever actually experience in real life. But, the imaginative fictional analogies and metaphors help to make certain points.
 

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
Generally and traditionally, philosophy has been about the nature of being. But in the 20th century it made a turn from being to human knowing.

And rather than make use of the capacity for humans beings to know the truth, modern philosophy has concentrated on the ways this capacity is limited and conditioned.

There are basically five directions or views going on right now.

There are the neo-Kantians who seek to revive the Enlightenment, the critical theory (specifically I am talking about Adorno and Horkheimer's book "Dialectic of Enlightenment" which says that Enlightenment inevitable leads to totalitarianism (and I should add Jergen Habermaus), the pre-Moderns (Hannah Arendt and Aladair MacIntyre) who say that the ancient Greeks had the right idea and the Enlightenment took a wrong turn, and the post-Modernist (Foucault, Derrida, Braudrillard, and I should add our own Gadfly) who can argue anyone out of their pants and believe that there is no possibility of objectivity and that everything is relative. And then there is the neo-pragmatist (Richard Rorty).

Only Habermaus and MacIntyre are still alive and they are in their late 80s.

But there are younger philosophers carrying on in all these schools of thought.

All of them have significant merit.

Personally, I am reading all of those authors now and trying to find syntheses of them all.

Existentialism is pretty much defunct, but it is still taught as he has a tremendous cultural influence and important in the evolution of ideas.

The Anabaptist Jacques

Good post. Does Ken Wilber count as a serious philosopher?I used to read some of his stuff back in the '90s.
 
Good post. Does Ken Wilber count as a serious philosopher?I used to read some of his stuff back in the '90s.

I don't know him by name, but if you take him seriously then he is a serious philosopher for you, I guess.

Any and all ideas and views that examine the human condition add to human knowledge.

Although I wouldn't consider Hubbard a serious philosopher, there are those who do.

The great philosophers don't necessarily give the answers, but they do teach us to ask the right questions.

The Anabaptist Jacques
 

Rene Descartes

Gold Meritorious Patron
Confucius say "Foolish man who see guillotine of death outside house of prostitution not enter house, smart man enter and never leave"

Rd00
 

Rene Descartes

Gold Meritorious Patron
All truth is contextual, i. e. any given datum can be either true or false as the context it is placed in changes.

Ditto with Right and Wrong.


Do our concepts of "justice" surpass contexts? I don't think so.

You might be correct, but jsut the same let's put it to the test.

Fact #1: Snow is yellow

Fact #2: Snow is yellow if you go where the huskies go

Fact #3: Yellow snow is not eaten


Ok let's examine the context.

Fact #1: Context is incomplete

Fact #2: Context is still incomplete

Fact #3: Context is complete


Conclusion: The Data Series sucks.

Rd00
 

Cat's Squirrel

Gold Meritorious Patron
I don't know him by name, but if you take him seriously then he is a serious philosopher for you, I guess.

Any and all ideas and views that examine the human condition add to human knowledge.

Although I wouldn't consider Hubbard a serious philosopher, there are those who do.

The great philosophers don't necessarily give the answers, but they do teach us to ask the right questions.

The Anabaptist Jacques

IMO, Wilber is one of the more important thinkers out there. If you can grasp this, for example (Wilber's stuff is notoriously densely written), you get a pretty good idea of his work;

http://www.fudomouth.net/thinktank/now_integralvision.htm

There's also a good interview with him in Salon magazine;

http://www.salon.com/2008/04/28/ken_wilber/
 
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