Karl

Enlightenment isn't inevitable. For many it may not even be a potential, for those who are capable very few will ever realise that potential.

Correct and incorrect are EXACTLY what we are discussing. We are conceptual beings forced to make judgements about our perceptions prior to ANY action. Justice is implicit, every action implies a moral choice. X is X. If your world is subjective then you cannot even begin to say it is, because you are uttering an objective statement. If you say 'I can't know anything' then you are making an objective, absolute statement whilst denying objective, absolute statements can be made. What goes for ships and sealing wax applies equally to every other thing. Why not ask the questions of yourself: where am I ? How do I know it ? What should I do ? You would not hesitate to judge something that you would buy, eat, or wear? You wouldn't get in a boat full of holes, buy a car without an engine, drink poison, or wear a cactus. Why ? What makes you so sure in your subjective world ? Why do you choose A over B ? Did you make an arbitrary choice, was it whim, did you resolve it purely by a feeling alone without any thought ? If you think so, then how does your feeling know it ?

Yet you are saying 'there is no such thing as being right' which negates your argument. You are stating an absolute whilst asserting there are no absolutes. You even say 'there is no way I can possibly be wrong' whilst asserting there is no way you can know that you can be right. Surely that's enough. You wrestled yourself into a heap on the ground. It's not me saying you are wrong, it's you that are saying you are wrong. I can't fight an opponent that insists on knocking himself out before the bell has even been rung to begin the first round. :-)

Again, you are making the assumption that right and wrong cannot be known because people make errors of judgement. Then you assert that people can make the right judgement due to some inbuilt emotional moral compass. How do you explain why some people protested against slavery and why you think they were correct to abolish slavery, if, as you assert, you cannot know right from wrong. Are you saying that you could actually be wrong, that your emotional compass is all screwed up and slavery is could actually be perfectly fine, that we didn't really know until we decided on it, we took a consensus approach, cast bones, threw some dice and decided that it was the wrong thing from that time forth ?

No. I asked you if you meant fun at any price, as you said that was what mattered.

Fun at any price ?

You are not making the case for revenge, you are building a case around the fact that men make errors. That applies to all cases of both revenge and Justice, my assertion is that it is better to at least try to make a reasoned moral judgement (justice) than to act from emotional fervour (revenge). In the case of slavery many men did judge it as immoral and acted to end it. They did not indulge in emotional revenge, they made sound reasoned arguments for abolition. Your argument would counter their reasoned justice as arbitrary and therefore you woukd act as if slavery was effectively amoral. You would argue that man cannot know the difference between right and wrong because he cannot ever be correct.

I didn't suggest a line, I said that I doubted you were free of fear. I can't say for definite because I cannot know your state of mind, or circumstances. For instance, if you were being eaten alive by cancer then you might reasonably be expected not to fear death, but you would instead fear the persistence of agony. Another man may not fear poverty because he has all the money he requires, but he might fear the thief who would steal it from him.

I never did wave a Union Jack. I've told you many times that I'm in it for the long game (or as long as I can keep doing it) because I enjoy it. The Brexit vote was an unexpected bonus for me-it felt like a bit of a reward for my efforts. One thing leads to another and it's pointless to prevaricate over the future direction of May and her Government, she either will, or she won't time will tell and events will follow. You are acting as if it was my only aim was to achieve Brexit and that any kind of setback would have me crying in my milk like the remainers do-hell, I had thought it a dead certainty we wouldn't get a referendum this side of my funeral, never mind winning it. We advanced a couple of steps towards Liberty. It has woken a large section of the population up who no longer subscribe to socialism, or progressive liberalism. I can tell you, from conversations and heated discussions that not only have ordinary working people not put away their newly discovered political weaponry, but are actively training with it and stocking ammunition. At least now I have people who want to learn and converse, where as, two years ago, trying to start a political discourse was the equivalent of asking someone to read the watch tower magazine.

Yes, I know, that's the worrying part, even though I have already explained it in several ways. If you don't get it, then more explanation isn't really going to help the situation.

I doubt you are beyond fear dear chap, but you certainly aren't concerned about what others think about your views and you would defend yourself and your property without any hesitation. I would suggest that you aren't a moral coward rather than you have no fear. If you had no fear then where would you know where to draw the line when taking a calculated risk ?

Justice is a moral judgement. A man made law can be moral or immoral.

Xenophobic buffoonery ? Earth to planet Gatito. :roller eyes: As a Brexiteers, if Britain leaving helps the ordinary people of the EU to improve their position and strength I would be very pleased. We had very little influence in the EU which is why we got nothing out of Cameron's supposed negotiations. We may have moderately slowed the pace of the project but we certainly didn't halt it. The very fact we don't use the Euro and the rest of Europe does tells that story very well. I don't know why you would think we would wish ill on our nearest allies, trading partners and cultural equals ? Leaving the EU was only ever about regaining control of our own country in the face of over 9 years of falling wages, falling productivity, uncontrolled immigration, declining standards of public services. Basically everyone who wasn't in the 0.1% that was feeling severely shafted and saw the uncontrolled immigration, high cost of membership and declining business competition as a direct result of our membership. I doubt it was all down to the EU, but it must be remembered that this wasn't really a vote against the EU, but against a status quo establishment who were responsible for the situation for ordinary workers as they see it. Anyone who supports the ordinary guy against the Neo aristocratic crony statist bureaucracy should understand. It's the same reason why the workers are rising up in all the other EU countries and demanding exit.

Neither would I, but then we are talking about a definition of justice and not the legal practice of justice. Justice can and should be practised outside the courtroom. We do so every day. Maybe someone gives us the wrong change and so we point it out and then pay the right amount. We have two choices: we can either say nothing (on one hand this would be moral cowardice and on the other practised dishonesty) or we complain we received too little, or admit they gave us too much. That is justice. A moral judgement handled in a rational way. Just recently we have witnessed a string of revenge killing against Muslim wives/daughters/sisters that have shamed the family by carrying out actions contrary to Islamic faith. There is no rationality employed in this sense. No justice at all, just pure emotional hatred turned into violent action.

Emotional parity. Im not talking about laws but justice. Revenge is emotionally motivated justice as opposed to rational justice. There is quite a gap between them.

I'm confused at your definition. I think you are thinking of the law as it is applied by the state, whilst I'm talking generally. So, we would judge objectively and meter out justice proportionately. Revenge is like "you insulted me so now I'm going to blow your head off" It isn't a rational judgement, it's whatever you feel like doing with complete disregard to any moral framework. This doesn't mean justice is always right, but it does mean you are at least attempting to use you mind instead of your emotions to arrive at a judgement.

Justice is objectively judged retribution. Justice is blind, unemotional morality. Revenge is emotionally driven violence devoid of moral judgement. I think you have your definitions reversed. Revenge is not a proportional balanced response, it is whatever the perpetrator 'feels' is appropriate and is not necessarily a response to rights being trespassed.

History.

I reckon about 6 months. The whole Turkish false flag coup suggests that it won't be long until we have Eurabia. The Euro is in trouble and the EUs policies are failing. There are stories that we may even see a civil war in France. The European banks are failing. Meanwhile the British pound has found its level at 1.32 as it was severely over valued compared to our debt level. The stock market is at a high, employment is rising, the Chinese want to buy into our high tech industries, Siemens is talking about a major investment, no one has left and several countries have approached us wanting to trade now that we are leaving. Even the IMF admits it made a mistake and has increased our forecast for growth. None of the nightmares came true. We got rid of the Bullingdon boys and have tipped Labour into collapse. It's like the Sun came out.

@ Brian "Notice that this approach -- this worldview -- truly precludes absolutes even if the current level of confidence on a particular topic might be so great as to tolerate occasional absolutist statements" Yet you are making an absolute statement. Precluding absolute statements IS making an absolute statement.

Did you mean revenge or justice. You are an anarchist so perhaps you do ascribe to the former. Revenge can be a non objective action bereft of evidence. It can be an emotional reaction devoid of reason.

We just don't talk in the same terms Brian. I'm a philosopher and you are a scientist. Your familiarity with your particular silo means that you jump on me from some aspect of my concretised epistemology. If I say the sky is blue as a fact, then you will tell me it is my eyes that deceive me, that it is the refractive index of the atmosphere, wavelength of light, cells in my eyes. I say it's an absolute and you go at it trying to tear scientific holes in the philosophical understanding. I already know that the blue in the sky is conceptual and that there are reasons why it appears blue, but it doesn't alter the fact that it is blue. Perception-conception is where you believe I'm doing mental gymnastics. It's not so, but appears there is bog all I can do to communicate it. I don't say that gravity is absolute, I say that the action (nature/ identity) of entities is absolute. So, if I drop an object onto the surface of the earth, it will, negating air pressure, accelerate at the same rate as every other object dropped from the same place and height. I'm not looking for the causes-I call gravity because that is the name of the concept-I don't know where gravity comes from, I only know that entities react and interact according to their nature. I can see that there is a correlation between those objects dropped from the same height, under the same conditions, at the same place. Maybe I effect the experiment, but that is not my province. I can see that at a given distance (relative object/earth) that the object takes a certain time to hit the ground (relative time) and I can see that those particular objects do not vary in the time taken. I do not say that a quark or meson would react the same, those objects have specific identities and relationships as well. I can determine from the two objects that mass does not appear to determine the acceleration. I also know that a heavy object takes more effort to lift to a height than does a lighter one. I can then determine something about the relative weights compared to a constant (in that particular case.). If you and I got together and I did the philosophy whilst you attended the science we would likely discover amazing things, but, alas it isn't to be.

He could have been, the early Rand found some of his philosophy attractive. Her own philosophy eventually eclipsed his. Where Nietzsche envisaged the amoral superman to whom everybody should be forced to surrender, Rand envisaged every man as the potential moral hero of his own life interacting voluntarily with others. Nietzsche is therefore anti-reason because he is pro-force. He becomes an inverted collectivist where men must surrender to one man who will determine everything, instead of the traditional collectivist ideology of one man surrendering to the mass of men.

I would concur, Brian is the scientist.

We aren't singing from a different book. Correct stems from discontentment at how it currently is. Once it is the way you want it then there is no more discontentment regarding those particular things, but a stone in the sock, or a fly in the room, a disturbing racket, or some other thing will always crop up. The fish in your ponds need feeding, they don't feed themselves. You are content as long as you are able to feed them. Yes to surrender when there is no alternative. When your life is no longer a value but brings misery. However, I'm not talking about that kind of surrender. I'm talking of those who surrender before they need to, because a cult tells them to. Nietzsche believed in a malevolent universe, I suspect, like me, you see a benevolent one as long as you are prepared to put the effort in there is an abundance of resource available to utilise in the quest for value.m