GARY.C. MOORE:
So, gentlemen, let us take on the question again. 'So, what does it mean linguistically 'for him who seeks an ethical philosophy?' ' If one is seeking igneous rock, does that make igneous rock good? James specifically takes on that problem in section II. 'First of all, it appears that such words have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists.' Jud and Richard, you should both have the essay at hand because James really drills this point in with all of its logical implications ruthlessly. I shall try to simply hit the highlights. As to matter, 'would there be any sense in saying of that world that one of its states is better than another? . . . We are asking whether goods and evils and obligations exist in physical facts per se. Surely there is no status for good and evil to exist in a purely insentient world. How can one physical fact, considered as a physical fact, be better than another? Betterness is not a physical relation.' This, I think, is perfectly compatible with Juds: ' I do not accept that 'moral relations' exist'

JUD EVANS:
Yes Gary, you and William James are ringing bells on the question of: 'words have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life exists.' for this is my main point of entry into the eliminativist ontology of what exists and what doesn't.

    The 'ontological filter' that I use is to imagine a world without human beings and then to assess what would actually exist in their absence? Obviously most of the natural objects with which we are familiar would still exist, although the way that many of them existed would be different [man-made forests, fields, vineyards, lakes and reservoirs, roads, paddies, quarries and plants of trees planted in straight lines would not exist etc] Yes, the oceans wouldn't be polluted and the atmosphere choked with carbon too, but this is not really what I am getting at, the point that I am anxious to make is that ETHICS AND MORALS AND WORDS wouldn't exist, or rather, in such a situation,  it would be obvious even to the most dull-brained idealist that these things don't exist.

    For the eliminativist of course, even in such a super-sentient human world in which we live, these human reifications are ALREADY known, understood or realised not to exist. It is only us opinionated human ethicists, the moralising moralists and wordifying wordifiers that actually exist.  We open and close our clackers and make fleeting (cosmos-wise meaningless) ephemeral changes to the oxygen that surrounds us with the membrane of our voice-boxes. Thus do we  convey a version of our opinion to others regarding the way we and others should be treated by the rest of our society. Sic transit gloria mundi - 'Thus passes the glory of the world.'

Look at the countless trillions of stars in the sky. Compared to the infinite majesty of the cosmos and the great dark sack of time, we can liken ourselves to dropsilla flies that live not merely for a day - but for a trillionth millionth of a nano-second.

And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before
The Tavern shouted--"Open then the Door!
You know how little while we have to stay,
And, once departed, may return no more."
Omar Khayaam.

 In such a humanless world the conceptualised, transcendentalist, discriminative Greekish reificational 'bolt-ons' of 'essence' [isness] and 'property,' and the dualistic model of an objective substrate [the 'stuff' or 'ousia' of which objects are composed] being the proud 'owner's' or preening 'proprietors' of their own 'blueness' or 'smoothness' or 'pungency' would evaporate like Scotch mist.

     In the absence of human conceptualisation and the need to descriptively categorise, the adjectival system would collapse and objects would revert to 'just being the objects they actually are.' Ding an Sich, exempted from the human attribution of the 'properties' of breadth and length, size, colour, smell, shape and sound and taste and feel and all the rest of the human-inspired identificatory (Lat. idem, the same), attribution based upon the relational aspects of objects figured in terms of the human sensorium.

     If humankind were wiped out, the goods and evils and obligations - the loves and hates and worries of the human imagination would be caught up in the whistling wind of a gigantic trannie-fart of finality and be swept away to the skies just like the swirling playing-cards in the court scene in Alice in Wonderland.

     For me of course ALL objects, including humans are ALREADY Ding am Sich - and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN just like any other object in the cosmos - they just happen to be
'thinking Ding an Sich' rather than 'fly-eating Ding an Sich' or 'moisture-bearing cloud of water droplets Ding an Sich.'

     As soon as the umbilical cord is cut we attain to and remain 'things in ourselves' for the rest of our lives - and we die as one.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I wonder if the statement 'How can one physical fact, considered as a physical fact, be better than another? can be answered as follows: If there is a reasonable premise that destruction or annihilation is 'bad' then the physical fact that some bit of matter is destroyed might be considered as being a 'bad' event. Of course one may challenge the premise, but then they must then go on to challenge a similar premise that states that the death of any living creature is 'bad,' -- the creature being any sentient thing, human or otherwise, for after all, we are all simply matter.

JUD EVANS:
I completely agree. In my mind's eye, I always insert a qualitative: 'From a human viewpoint,' or, 'from the viewpoint of some humans' before any proposition or statement of opinion [moral or ethical claim.]

     For many humans the premise that: 'the destruction of Saddam Hussain is desireable' was a reasonable example that the destruction or annihilation of a certain object in certain circumstances was good - whilst for many others it was bad. Yet others would say that the legal destruction of any human object [execution] was bad, not just because it was good or bad to destroy Saddam Hussain, but it was bad to judicially destroy any member of the human race.

    Like any other spectrum of opinion [which is all that ethics or morals is, stripped of the hi falutin verbiage that surrounds it and puts food on the table for many authors] there is a whole compass of compromise. There is a lot of: 'ifs' and 'buts' and 'maybes' between 'good' and 'bad.'

'Shoot him - or I shoot you!'

and

'I am against the death penalty in principle - but that bastard killed my daughter!' etc.

GARY. C.MOORE:
This is true. Simply observe the ordinary process of remembrance of a person after their death. When their actions totally cease to effect the actions and thoughts of others directly they are soon forgotten. What acts they did do in the past become separate 'entities' in the present to be dealt with as necessary. What is regarded as a 'person' in a human being erodes immediately until the press of current necessities erases them altogether.

JUD EVANS:
No, Gary it is a European thing too. First the photograph of the deceased loved one goes in a prominent position on the mantelpiece. Sometime later, a little yellower, it is moved to a side table. Eventually: 'I think there's a photograph of Jack in the attic somewhere? I'll check it out next time I go to service the water-tank.' Finally the house gets demollished and the bric a bra end up in a skip. The Mona Lisa and the Complete works of Shakespeare will EVENTUALLY end up in the sky-skip called: 'The Great Maw of Time.'

GARY.C. MOORE:
This may be mainly an American phenomena, I do not know, but history stays 'alive' primarily as long as historical participants maintain its importance [like W. W. II]. Though certain events can be demonstrated to have still present causative pressures in the present [like the Civil War or W. W. I], since no one any longer 'livingly' asserts these events as events that involved living participants, their importance, and especially their philosophical, economic, and political lessons and still present causative factors, are ignored and forgotten altogether so that no one seriously takes into consideration in present political action what happened even in the recent past. And this is not a specific this and that reference but covers the whole broad range of every kind of history, personal and private as well as world-wide. It is not a deliberate turning of blind eyes to possible consequences, but simply an overwhelming concern for what is needed right now only for the most immediate future, even for issues that are suppose to be long term seem to be temporally turned inside out for the purpose of immediate application [the environment, the world bank, or any specific problem that has gained present attention with no consideration of the collateral consequences of any action on that specific problem].

     So I am saying that essentially the materialism of history has already taken strong hold on dissolving the importance of human death from the highest political nabob to the lowest homeless person.

JUD EVANS:
Genau mein guter Freund! As the great son of the tentmaker said:

GARY.C. MOORE:
That it can be 'bad' has merely become a matter of quantity, either of mere numbers or present celebrity however frivolous by rational standards that may be. The death of the lowly - and we are the lowly - has always been a matter of indifference in actual practice whose 'badness' could only become notable for political purposes. But now even the deaths of the politically important - for a surviving politician they are simply someone 'in the way', and now problem solved, or 'needs to be immediately replaced' - create much of a stir. Even if monuments are built, they are 'faceless' of personality, purely utilitarian - for the use of others with little or no remembrance of the person who died. Evil only exists for each living person - if even that applies - simply for their own purposes and reasons. And in such a specific, limited context, does not the very meaning of evil cease to exist?

JUD EVANS:
So true! As the wise Persian said:

GARY.C. MOORE:
THE ESSENTIALLY EQUIVOCAL BASIS OF ETHICS
PART 1

When one says that something is real, it is because it is - or can be - demonstrated as either sensuously, physically present or logically, mathematically demonstrated according to self-evident, axiomatic logical, mathematical premises and rules universally accepted. In Plato’s time, geometry was the preeminent model of perfection of reasoning. When the problem was stated and resolved consistently, there could be no disagreement whatsoever - except through pure emotional contrariness - about the correctness of the solution. This is the only model of rational correctness in persuasion. Any other process presented as persuasion as to what is correct has to be analogical, comparative, what is called *reasonable* but not at all strictly rational in a mathematical sense. This is where one *takes council*, discusses things, to try to dialectically shake down a problem to only *possible* solutions of which there can be several, whereas a mathematical solution proposes only one solution as the only and absolutely correct one. As Aristotle says, *No one takes counsel about things that he holds to be incapable of having been otherwise, being otherwise in the future, or being otherwise now* [RHETORIC 1357a5-7].


As William James demonstrated in his essay, ethics is necessarily dependent for its mathematical/physically demonstrative-type certainty on divinity of which there can be numerous divinities claiming ontological certainty for their ethics based on, literally, the quantitative *amount* of authority, i. e., force. God is right and good and can lay down the law because he is God, because he can literally, physically demonstrate his power. However, this is not the case. No God has demonstrated anything of the sort. All evidence to support such a contention has been from the distant past witnessed by people not only long dead but also of highly unreliable veracity [David Hume’s essay
*On Miracles*]. All other arguments that purport to be *rational* in the sense of mathematical certainty always turn out to be analogical, comparative, that is, *If this is done like this, and that is similar, then it must have been done in the same way [the watchmaker argument which is always the fundamental model, paradigm, for all other theological arguments for the existence of God].*


*** QUOTE***
THE HERMENEUTICS OF ORIGINAL ARGUMENT: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric, by P. Christopher Smith, Northwestern University Press, 1998, pg 113.

***In ethical matters, then, in questions of what is the good, right, and decent thing to do, there is for us no divine argument, no theos logos after all but only human argument, only ho anthropinos logos . . . . the unavailability of mathematical eide for ethical reasoning. Here, *in the world* of our taking care of things with each other there is no transformation of questionable belief into some unshakable mathematical insight regarding what each of these *is*, no eidos *after which* these words might be named. Consequently opinions about these will always be divided and *go in contrary directions,* and here most of all the ethos of the speaker and the pathos he or she communicates are decisive.***END QUOTE.


Ethics is rhetorical, that is, based on the *character* of the speaker who elicits *trust*, pistis, faith and conviction.


*** QUOTE***     Idem. Pg 112

***The result of our investigation of the PHAEDO is remarkable: in the end Plato agrees with Aristotle that the only difference between sophistical and rhetorical argumentis in the prohairesis biou, the choice of life, that the speaker has always already made. Consequently, the only available way to secure a logos that would convince an audience to decide for the good, right, and decent life is through changing the pathos and disthesis of that audience, through changing, that is to say, its feeling and disposition from mistrust and fear to trust and confidence. This means, in turn, establishing with the audience the good, righteous, and decent ethos or character of the speaker . .***END QUOTE


This accords perfectly with William James thesis and, I think, supports several things that Jud has said. But I have NOT looked over the recent correspondence well at all, just glanced over it and hope this weekend to seriously analyze it. But I think these points needed to be presented. There is also much more in Smith.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Is the cutting down of a tree 'bad?' Certainly for the continued living existence of the tree it is. Of course this begs the question as to the meaning of 'bad,' [and 'good.'] .

GARY. C.MOORE:
Very much so. It is a personifying of material objects. Now, we are material objects. Is it even legitimate to say good and evil are even meaningful terms for us? William James presents - in his unobtrusive manner that sometimes seems sympathetic to a viewpoint that really does not share but is merely being 'polite' and letting it have its proper say - the evolution of ethics in brief as, first, the dictates of a tyrant, thinking themselves God, who lays down what is right and wrong. This is a person uniquely by themselves in a material universe utterly unaffected by their judgement of their 'wheels spinning but not touching the ground' speculations. Then comes another person who also thinks they are God and each engages in a strife to convert the other to believe that he is the true God. And this is how ethics is actually practiced, stripped of obfuscation. If you claim there can be much more sophisticated viewpoints of ethics, James would have you go right back to the beginning point and see if such a sophisticated ethics actually performs in any different way. By itself, what can it effect? Nothing but your self. If another comes, what happens? A contest of wills as to whose
'right' view will dominate the other. What seems perfectly clear when it is a matter of the many versus the many, becomes perfectly ludicrous when it materialistically, without referring to anyone else, becomes purely one on one.

JUD EVANS:
Exactly, ethics is no more than agenda-driven opinion.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Bentham believed that pain was the only evil and pleasure the only good “

JUD EVANS:
Tell that to a Masochist! ;-) [joke]

RICHARD SANSOM:
Otherwise the terms have no meaning. But there is much lacking in Bentham's utilitarian approach to ethics. Being a moral relativist [since I cannot find any other position reasonable] I see 'bad' as having meaning only in terms of a social consensus. In Saudi Arabia, it is just fine to stone a woman to death if she has been raped i. e. not  'bad.' I must admit that in the greater scheme of the cosmos [whatever that scheme might be] I find concerns about what is 'bad' and 'good' to be nonsensical concerns. Of course we have these moral issues, and must live our lives according to this and that calculus of 'betterment, ' 'pleasure,' 'pain,' 'reward,' and all the other emotional factors that come into play.

GARY. C.MOORE:
But are 'emotional factors' legitimately 'moral issues'?

RICHARD SANSOM:
But in this rarefied atmosphere of philosophical entertainment, should we not call a spade a spade and realize that such concepts as moral abstractions are completely without meaning? To the earthworm being eaten by the robin is BAD. To the robin, being without sustenance for its self and its young is BAD. Catching the worm is GOOD.

GARY. C.MOORE:
This is simply personification again. Does the robin or worm have a 'person' to personify? Actually I think that is a very interesting question since Jud already knows I presume to have found in Aristotle a natural process of rational judgment in animals.

JUD EVANS:
Yes, Gary - I read your comments on the matter with great interest years ago. Heidegger picked up on this question too didn't he? Perhaps he was trying to butter-up to his Hitler-God and please him by suggesting that his dog Blondi was a canine  intellectual?

BTW it just clicked - 'blondi' was obviously chosen because of the predominant blondness of the super-race.

GARY.C. MOORE:
It is true such judgment or 'kinein' is based on purely material, physiological processes, but at some point - I used the lion - pure focus of senses, memory of acceptable hunting requirements and procedures, contextualization of the situation, leadership and ordering of the other members of the Pride, estimation of distance and speed, obviously must create some kind of 'self' or 'person' wherein one can also find all the fundamental elements of the human mind, even to a limited extent language.

JUD EVANS:
That makes a lot of sense to me Gary.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Would the lion think in terms of 'bad' or even 'success' or 'failure'?

JUD EVANS:
I imagine that would be more a qualia-type feeling of: a 'warm flush accompanied by increased salivation,' or 'recognition of situation accompanied by relaxation of muscles etc.' In other words I imagine a lion 'feels' rather than 'thinks,' or 'deals with incoming data' in response to bodily needs, rather than plans? AND YET the hunting mode suggest a high degree of organisation? But if it is instinctual it would be rather like 'acting out a modalic script' rather than 'writing an action script.' But it is certainly a fascinating subject.

GARY.C. MOORE:
Is that what 'good' and 'evil' really boil down to, success or failure so that ethics is merely the forecasting of a plan for living? Either way, ethics as such is not necessary and emotions, though undeniably possessed in all animals - as reaction if nothing else, is a very dubious survival trait since they necessarily interfere with clear judgment, even though they may get the sluggardly to act when they need to. That is not much of a plaudit. However, I must admit 'success' and 'failure' would have little force in themselves without emotion, and it is for those rewards all plans are made, however coldly rational is the inception. Even a Stoic has to have some kind of passion for Stoicism. But then the Stoic’s passion is mainly concerned with maintaining a distance from other passions and desires. So what can justify a Stoic’s passion? If passions are inherently harmful, if not evil, in themselves, then the same judgment must apply to the Stoic’s passion. Such terms as come to my mind, absolute independence, total self-sufficiency, require a self to be prized emotionally which is not acceptable. The 'self' becomes an 'external' to reason and therefore inherently indifferent until judged and assented to. It is the 'guiding factor', the 'hegemonikon', and is maybe a logical contradiction within Stoicism to be emotionally prized.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I agree to some degree with Bentham but not entirely. We are just animals; but we have managed to invent these names for things that have inspired a million dissertations, books, bulls, etc. and are no better off for it all. As long as we chase the meanings of words we will inevitably end up chasing our tails and catching nothing. We are just these complex arrangements of matter that, due to some extraordinarily improbable event, evolved on this little rock of a planet and believe that we can actually KNOW something. We KNOW nothing. Its all a lark of language and dreams.

JUD EVANS;
For me it is a question of how we spend what time we have available left  to us. What one enjoys. What one finds satisfying. My own attitude, particularly in this my later life, has been to find out just how much I have been conned by other 'so-called philosophers' and 'so-called religionists' before I finally 'pop my clogs.' [to put one's wooden shoes in a pawnbrokers shop for the final time - a Lancashire expression for die.] It could be said: 'Why bother even with that? You are still going to die and what will it matter if you go to your grave knowing that you have been the victim of a huge ontological con trick or happily unaware like a pig dying in transcendentalist turdery?'

RICHARD SANSOM:
I realize that such opinions will run contrary to the academics and all those who actually believe that there is valuable currency in the meanings of words [i. e. concepts] but I challenge them to find any concrete I realize that such opinions will run contrary to the academics and all those who actually believe that there is valuable currency in the meanings of words [i. e. concepts] but I challenge them to find any concrete 'contrary evidence.'

GARY. C.MOORE:
I am confused as to which viewpoint you are asserting. Is a human being wholly an animal - and no more - or not?

RICHARD SANSOM:
... evidence that we are no more than any other kind of animal who seeks to sustain its existence by whatever means are at hand. Some use words; others use bullets; others use the ideas of fear; still others use ideas of gods or a god. But when we strip away all that is merely and only the trappings of words that are wrapped around feelings that are expressed in words, we see that we are nothing more than matter that is animated in this curious fashion the fashion of most often accepting a conceptual, not a real, world. The real world is sensed, felt, bathed in, reacted to and from that we move on to the next moment of our life. And that is all there is to it.

    Any philosopher who tells you that he/she KNOWS something is automatically suspect. As him or her to define 'knowing' and he will have to then define a plethora of other abstractions that, in the end, are like cotton candy tasty, but vacuous, and unfulfilling.

JUD EVANS:
Again, For me it is a question of how we spend what time we have available to us. I think that having gone [developed] intellectually thus far,  it is almost impossible to spend leisure time gorping/gawping [Lancashire dialect: 'gazing mindlessly' ] at TV trash etc. One rapidly becomes bored with 'standard' conversation. We need the stimulation of thinking about the world and our place in it,  measured against the ideas of others of our ilk [or even not of our ilk.] Some find pleasure in tending their rose garden, others by visiting old castles, or contemplating antique snuffboxes. Still others keep breeding canaries, or buy a metal-detector and search for old coins, or spend endlessly enjoyable hours lovingly contemplating their stamp collection with the myriad of historical and social connections to be found on stamp designs etc.

     Like Boethius [although my mind is not so concentrated as his was on a more proximate death] I find my consolation in the information, the joys, laughs and tribulations supplied within that arena of opinion known as 'philosophy.'

Information and joy a'plenty in the sub-domain of eliminative materialism, and belly laughs galore in the demesne of transcendentalism and Heideggerian burlesque.

But I realise for others it is entirely the other way around - so be it - or 'so mote it be.'


RICHARD SANSOM:But in this rarified atmosphere of philosophical entertainment, should we not call a spade a spade and realize that such concepts as moral abstractions are completely without meaning? To the earthworm being eaten by the robin is BAD. To the robin, being without sustenance for its self and its young is BAD. Catching the worm is GOOD.


GARY.C. MOORE:This is simply personification again. Does the robin or worm have a
*person* to personify?


RICHARD SANSOM:
Yes, of course it is an anthropocentric remark and I am speaking for those animals cousins for whom speech and opinion is denied. Being an animal myself I feel imminently qualified to be the surrogate for my brethren animals who cannot engage in such work play. In claiming that *bad* and *good* have certain meanings I am claiming the right to define them appropriate to my position in the animal kingdom. This argument gains strength in the sense that I believe strongly that sustenance, shelter, procreation and defense are the key ingredients of all organisms and that I have the right to be a spokesman for our relative species since those ingredients are mine as well.

GARY.C. MOORE:
But these arguments apply to predator and prey alike and to your human enemy who would take these things away from you for himself and his own family. In natural social situations, this is merely something to be expected and any other kind of behavior regarded as deceitful or incomprehensible. *Good* and *bad* as humans use them in their utter confusion of *social consensus* does not apply here in the slightest. For a Sioux to be kind to a Pawnee without the proper political/ritual situation explicitly established between them would be considered insane in their societies. Outsiders and strangers are always regarded, first, as enemies to be killed, unless unusual circumstances arise between the parties involved in which one side needs to find out what the other side is thinking, what their purpose is, before judgment and action. *You protect your own* is the primary rule of human interaction. If no threat seems immediate, then reconnaissance is necessary. Each side regards the other as acting for its own natural *good* wherein *bad* becomes nonsense.

Actually I think that is a very interesting question since Jud already knows I presume to have found in Aristotle a natural process of rational judgment in animals. It is true such judgment or *kinein* is based on purely material, physiological processes, but at some point - I used the lion - pure focus of senses, memory of acceptable hunting requirements and procedures, contextualization of the situation, leadership and ordering of the other members of the Pride, estimation of distance and speed, obviously must create some kind of *self* or *person* wherein one can also find all the fundamental elements of the human mind, even to a limited extent language. Would the lion think in terms of *bad* or even *success* or *failure*? Is that what *good* and *evil* really boil down to, success or failure so that ethics is merely the forecasting of a plan for living? Either way, ethics as such is not necessary and emotions, though undeniably possessed in all animals - as reaction if nothing else, is a very dubious survival trait since they necessarily interfere with clear judgment, even though they may get the sluggardly to act when they need to. That is not much of a plaudit.


RICHARD SANSOM:
We presume that lions and all other creatures, but ourselves, do not have the wherewithal to frame and put forth concepts of good and bad. I do not believe for a moment that the lion or any other non-human animal deals with the concepts we do.


GARY.C. MOORE:
Actually I would say there are perceptual concepts and verbal concepts because obvious a lion can perceptually conceive the whole plan for a hunt. We also have perceptual concepts for exactly the same reason, most ably demonstrated in the actions of those whom Dreyfus considers physical experts, professional sports people, veteran soldiers. Verbal concepts with them, at best, are merely for the beginners since any test of ability has to be wholly physical.


RICHARD SANSOM:
[Good for them, and bad for us – in a way.] As humans we have forfeited the right to simply act according to innate propensities [*nature, red in tooth and claw* – Tennyson] and accepted the usually highly dishonest behavior of presenting ourselves as what we are not – i. e., presenting ourselves as these *rational* thinking creatures who KNOW what is right and wrong, and all the while wishing to slash the throat of an adversary out of some primitive urge our *civilized* self has managed [usually] to thwart.


GARY.C. MOORE:
Actually that might justify a kind of ethical purity in professional people of action since they are wholly concerned with correct, that is, successful technique.
However, I must admit *success* and *failure* would have little force in themselves without emotion, and it is for those rewards all plans are made, however coldly rational is the inception.

This most certainly applies to my new immediately above comment.
Even a Stoic has to have some kind of passion for Stoicism. But then the Stoic passion is mainly concerned with maintaining a distance from other passions and desires. So what can justify a Stoic passion? If passions are inherently harmful, if not evil, in themselves, then the same judgment must apply to the Stoic passion. Such terms as come to my mind, absolute independence, total self-sufficiency, require a self to be prized emotionally which is not acceptable. The *self* becomes an *external* to reason and therefore inherently indifferent until judged and assented to. It is the *guiding factor*, the *hegemonikon* , and is maybe a logical contradiction within Stoicism to be emotionally prized.


RICHARD SANSOM:
(previously) I agree to some degree with Bentham but not entirely. We are just animals; but we have managed to invent these names for things that have inspired a million dissertations, books, bulls, etc. and are no better off for it all. As long as we chase the meanings of words we will inevitably end up chasing our tails and catching nothing. We are just these complex arrangements of matter that, due to some extraordinarily improbable event, evolved on this little rock of a planet and believe that we can actually KNOW something. We KNOW nothing. Its all a lark of language and dreams.


RICHARD SANSOM:
I realize that such opinions will run contrary to the academics and all those who actually believe that there is valuable currency in the meanings of words [i. e. concepts] but I challenge them to find any concrete ---


GARY.C. MOORE:*contrary evidence*?


RICHARD SANSOM:
---evidence that we are no more than any other kind of animal who seeks to sustain its existence by whatever means are at hand.

GARY.C. MOORE:
omit *no*? I am confused as to which viewpoint you are asserting. Is a human being wholly an animal - and no more - or not?


RICHARD SANSOM:
You are right -- *contrary* is correct. And your ask *Is a human being wholly an animal - and no more - or not?* [I do not like to use human BEING – I prefer simply, *human.*].

GARY.C. MOORE:
There is a very interesting section of Christopher Smiths book where he delineates the consultative, rhetorical view of logic as related directly to immediate *life* situations, problems of living that must be solved right now as in Thucydides, and the theoretical aspect of Plato where, when he discusses *good* he wants a definition that gives an idea that is *forever*, past, present, and future, the same - always, in every situation, timeless, which *is*, that is, *good* is *being*, just like Heidegger and Jud talk about. You are perfectly correct in your preference. Plato is striving to create a mathematical structure to justify the *Good* precisely because it *is*, is *the meaning of being* and is *one* and, of course, God. Situational, individual human life, here, has, been forcibly evolved into divine being so that we do not even possess our own lives, since the *soul* is Gods, and eventually suicide is condemned as the very worst of sins, a slander against the Holy Spirit. I hope you can see the advantages of fractalizing theological concepts here.

RICHARD SANSOM:
And yes, I am claiming that we are only, simply and wholly, animals, no more, no less. Of course we are different from ants, and all other species, but sea urchins are different from earthworms, so what?


GARY.C. MOORE:
Since finding the *differences* has been so horribly abused for theological reasons of whatever color, I prefer to search for what plausibly might be like me in an ant or sea urchin. I think one can discover a great deal thinking this way.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I do not like to dwell too much on the features of our differences with other animals, since it seems to me to be a useless endeavor.


GARY.C. MOORE:This is one of the reasons why I like Jeffry Mousieff Masson so much. He has the expertise to study, like Michael Creiton, a broad range of animal behavior without the prejudices touted in the college classroom as to how we should regard animals since we will have to deal with them as experimental objects necessarily and doctrinally regarded as without real feeling. Here, personalization is, within reasonable limits, regardable as legitimate. He has discovered animals acting as unique, eccentric individuals within the herd - wildebeasts -as well as reflecting human emotions in appropriate situations - grief for instance - elephants.

RICHARD SANSOM:
We all have our niche. Apparently our niche is one of babbling and building. I like what W. James says about all the babbling theories regarding what we are and how we behave. We are what we do, say and build, and all the theories that pretend to offer up what our trillions of cells are up to are nothing more than babble -- to date. I am reminded of Berkeleys ontology, and the simple fact that he, his theories aside, had his eggs and bacon in spite of their purely mental existence. The pragmatist would make short work of such babble.  James has to be approached from his rhetorical side. He wants people to read him first and then judge him rationally. This entails not saying an absolute ethics is utter nonsense and any theological scheme of God the same. The things he can get away with calling babble, because many other people already call it so, he names directly as babble. But not ethics or religion. He wants to present his case as sympathetically and neutral as possible first, and leave the judgment to the reader in these things.

JUD EVANS:
*There is no such a thing as evil. Neither is there such a thing as goodness. There are only opinionated humans who exist in modes of believing what is appropriate and what is not.  By *opinionated* I do not mean that they are narrow-minded [though some people are] but simply that they have been socialised into internalising certain views.


GARY.C. MOORE:
I would say this view is correct except that it fits everybody somewhere in their habitual modes of thought. There are always concepts within us we do not adequately analyze, and this applies to absolutely everyone.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Jud, yes, of course this is true. However, as language [and minds] would have it, we must deal with the beliefs as they appear in those opinionated humans : I see this as rather like a disease; there is no such thing as a disease – only the bacteria or viruses or other physical pathogens that intrude the body, etc.. My question for you is this: Since there is virtually universal acceptance of the *reality* of goodness and evil [as there is acceptance in diphtheria or polio] what is the ultimate harm in having such beliefs? [I think I know the answer, but I would like to see yours – and Garys.]


GARY.C. MOORE:
This applies forever and for all times - We are on our own. We have our thoughts, but must be careful in how we express them for many different reasons. And, like Marcus Aurelius, we must regard others as not perfectly obvious in the motivations of their actions since we counsel to ourselves concern in how we demonstrate our own to public view. However we may dislike their behavior, if we knew them in their innermost - whatever - they may have a perfectly good reason for what they are doing, or, second best, like Epictetus and Medea, once the other person is understood properly, their actions, though wrong by a better rational scheme of things, may be perfectly understandable and even emphatic if fully understood. I was deeply impressed by Epictetus statement that, despite all, he thought her passion was something grand. He is obviously not a moral nit-picker.


JUD EVANS:
To draw a parallel, if the 0.86 billion baptised members of the Roman Catholic Church - the largest branch of Christianity on earth - say or believe that Jesus rolled back the stone from the tomb and hightailed it back aloft to big daddy in the sky, for me the harm is that there are 0.86 billion idiots in the world with all the actual and potential harm that such ignorance entails for humanity. [fill in your own abuses starting with [say] the Inquisition, Galileo Galilei, the thousands that died in the 100 years war, Ireland, the massacre of the Huguenots, etc.] In France in one week, almost 100,100 Protestants perished. The rivers of France were so filled with corpses that for many months no fish were eaten. When news of The Saint Bartholomew' s Day Massacre reached the Vatican there was jubilation! Cannons roaredbells rungand a special commemorative medal was struckto honour the occasion! The Pope commissioned Italian artist Vasari to paint a mural of the Massacrewhich still hangs in the Vatican!
The fact that most people accept that *goodness and evil* exist leaves me absolutely cold. I recognise it as a fact of life, but have no desire either to pretend that I agree with them in order to enjoy a peaceful life, or [shudder the thought] that they may believe that I am *one of them.* For me, agreeing with the idiots [like liar Blair and blunderer Bush and the religious right] is [for me] like waving the white flag on my integrity as a thinking human.
*** But I am sure that you anticipated this kind of an answer? ;-)

GARY.C. MOORE:
I can find Christian thinkers I can derive some benefit and even illumination from. But [A] the tremendous amount of education they have had put them above the common run of fanatics, strictly rationally oriented [which always resolves down to Catholic only] - [proviso- some of the people who led or approved the events Jud listed were almost highly educated in the same system, so it is no guarantee - but sometimes if one looks into a specific situation one finds possible excuses - that is essentially what they amount to - such as Augustines persecution of the Docetists which essentially was the religious liberals persecuting the kill-or-be-killed religious super-conservatives - or the inquisition which was purportedly set up to stop secular kangaroo courts from executing people as heretics when they simply had wealth the
*jury* wanted. The Inquisition in Spain even under Torquemada did nothing near what Protestant propaganda said it did [[a very modern, post-Franco discovery - one wonders if he delayed the investigation deliberately]], and the horrors the Spanish army under the Duc de Alba in the Netherlands performed in public view was once again done primary under arbitrary military, secular authority. However, no pope condemned the Duc that I know of, but one of the popes did publicly criticize the Spanish monarchys abuse of the Spanish Inquisition for political and economic reasons. It is a give and take. Justice says each situation should be judged on its own. However, over all, Jud is undoubtedly perfectly correct.

RICHARD SANSOM: [previously]
Bentham believed that pain was the only evil and pleasure the only good, otherwise the terms have no meaning. But there is much lacking in Benthams utilitarian approach to ethics. Being a moral relativist [since I cannot find any other position reasonable] I see *bad* as having meaning only in terms of a social consensus.

GARY,C. MOORE:
But that merely turns out to be a *found thing* like running into an auto accident blocking your road. It is just something you have to deal with just like dealing with a change of boss at work, maybe even more so. *Social consensus* per se has absolutely no logical validity in itself. It just happens. It is prefigured purely by historical circumstances through and through including all of its dinosaur appendages that have no modern relevancy whatsoever like Christianity. How can such a thing survive in an age almost totally involved with *seeing is believing*? I mean I can work out relevancies of Christian formulae from my point of view that, to me, explain the real fundamental psychology of the human mind in dialectic with the real and necessary approach the human mind must take to what *God* really, internally, personally must mean to a Christian thinker trying to explain his position rationally and honestly.

The point is, it is merely something you have to deal with but have no legitimate reason to regard as serious to thought in and of itself. Only fractals of it might be worthy of thought, but the *whole* is a mere conglomerate accident. And a *fractal* cannot make an ethics in and of itself. That is one of the reasons why I have harped on the fundamental ground of stoic ethics: sense impression, judgment, assent or non-assent. Few people, if any, comprehend that this purely is born out of self-interest because in really, materially, logically, the only person you can directly understand is yourself and yourself only. Now after this point, one might work out several different rational schemes of *ethical* thought, and though Stoicism and Epicureanism and Skepticism are supposed to be very different, they simply take different approaches to the same thing and come to conclusions that are reverse mirror images of each other merely reflecting those different but rational approaches. And there may well be other rational approaches very much more different from these almost exact mirror reflections of each other that no one simply recognizes and relates based exactly on the same axiomatic beginning.

In actual theological archeology, such an approach discovers no unified *concept* of God whatsoever, but merely the fractals that existentially arise in a rational believers approach to the historically given [*found thing* again, which means each Christian thinkers approach breaks down into different fractals according to their personal history and immediate historical situation such as Anasthasius]. These fractals in actually demonstrate fascinating discernments and imaginative/logical abilities in some theologians of a very high order that demonstrate how a human being necessarily regards any material being that is a *superior* or rather *grander* scale that the human contemplating it such as to Kant *the starry heavens above* or to him and me a sky stretching mountain range which, in a bureaucratically logical way, can be filed under a very unimportant classification but still inspires awe when actually experienced. This also applies to Hume and the imagination because he regards the human *self* as a very trivial thingy because of:

[A] Jud's materialistic determinism which he whole heartedly subscribes to, while acknowledging he cannot possibly comprehend all of its details, and

[B] imagination which creates the ability to think and the whole range of thinking tools so that imagination always stands as a superior power to the self to which it is a mere minion.

Both *determinism* and *imagination* are fractals of the failed conceptualization of God, and you can easily see how they exist purely on their own without even a nod to their birthplace in the throws of many very different kinds of *theology* - for instance Aristotles which, as purely his own, goes completely contrary to almost every other kind, and yet is claimed by almost all theologians because of his historical high status in thought.

In my earlier letter, I brought in the problem of the absolute lack of any mathematical/logical foundation of ethics, that any such ethics depends upon the rhetorical persuasion, a logic itself but a purely contingent logic, based on various different kinds of comparison. Most such persuasions are dependent primarily on Richards *social consensus*. But even a limited *social consensus* has many variables within itself which are supported by majorities and minorities - it is never a unified *thing* at all, not in the slightest. So any *persuasion* - usually - must appeal to the predominant majorities in any one *social consensus* over the minorities. In times of crisis, however, appealing to one minoritys view as providing a solution to a problem the majority views could not solve might provide a phronemos - you should have read Dreyfus short article - with the fulcrum to move the whole of the *social consensus* in a direction it otherwise probably would not have taken in the natural course of events. Such a phronemos, wise man, expert moral advisor is Adolf Hitler. Something to think about, especially since Dreyfus primary approach to this problem is Pragmatist and Aristotelian.

RICHARD SANSOM:
I must admit that in the greater scheme of the cosmos [whatever that scheme might be] I find concerns about what is *bad* and *good* to be nonsensical concerns.


GARY,C. MOORE:
For any human being of the present day and age, it is utterly beyond them to seriously contemplate any *scheme of the cosmos* which would involve tremendous advances in technology, first, and them a scheme of thought that might comprehend what technology discovers. This is not a legitimate philosophical or theological field of thought. Technology, here, comes first, no matter what. And there are no plausible hypotheses that can be constructed at this time. Rather, what is important is to think what it means to a human mind to truly understand all the consequences of that fact.

RICHARD SANSOM:
Of course we have these moral issues, and must live our lives according to this and that calculus of *betterment, * *pleasure,* *pain,*
*reward,* and all the other emotional factors that come into play.

GARY,C. MOORE:
*Come into play* precisely describes a *found object* situation.: But are *emotional factors* legitimately *moral issues*?

RICHARD SANSOM:
Gary, might it be the case that emotional factors are the ONLY legitimate moral issues? If one begins and ends a moral argument by an appeal to anything of the mind that is NOT of an emotional nature, what is it that comprises such a position? Deductive or inductive logic?

GARY,C. MOORE:
Broadly what you say is perfectly obvious. But *emotional factors* have a logical hierarchy of importance -
1] the individual life;
2] close family;
3] extended family;
4] friends and acquaintances;
5] people of the same locale;
6] people with economic or political power;
7] political authorities superseded all the above, and on and on. *One should sacrifice ones life for ones country*, *One should always obey legitimate leaders*, etc. *One should always love and protect ones wife*.

JUD EVANS:
This exactly mirrors Richard's *Circles of Empathy* which he developed in his TWTWI
(The Way The World Is.) some years back, of which I have a copy on a shelf to my right.

GARY,C. MOORE:
All of these ethical  *emotional factors* very often come into violent conflict with each other which ethical formulae try to smooth over in favor of the more powerful *emotional factor* of which none of these have any real rational agreement. So it goes back once again to ethics as mere rag-tag *social consensus* with no rational coherence whatsoever, merely a *found thing* one is born into.

***

GARY.C. MOORE:But that merely turns out to be a *found thing* like running into an auto accident blocking your road. It is just something you have to deal with just like dealing with a change of boss at work, maybe even more so. *Social consensus* per se has absolutely no logical validity in itself.

It just happens. It is prefigured purely by historical circumstances through and through including all of its dinosaur appendages that have no modern relevancy whatsoever like Christianity. How can such a thing survive in an age almost totally involved with *seeing is believing*? I mean I can work out relevancies of Christian formulae from my point of view that, to me, explain the real fundamental psychology of the human mind in dialectic with the real and necessary approach the human mind must take to what
*God* really, internally, personally must mean to a Christian thinker trying to explain his position rationally and honestly.

RICHARD SANSOM:

Gary, I do not believe that any social or cultural process has *logical validity,* except in the sense that it might be considered logical that the ideas, beliefs, fears etc. of large groups over time may coalesce into something more or less permanent – at least for a few generations, and often much longer..[See my little set of questions later on]

***

Gary:

The point is, it is merely something you have to deal with but have no legitimate reason to regard as serious to thought in and of itself. Only fractals of it might be worthy of thought, but the *whole* is a mere conglomerate accident. And a *fractal* cannot make an ethics in and of itself. That is one of the reasons why I have harped on the fundamental ground of stoic ethics: sense impression, judgment, assent or non-assent.

RICHARD SANSOM:

Are not these – sense impression, judgment and assent or non-assent – more or less the same ingredients of most thoughtful and sane and folks use in everyday decisions, moral and otherwise? I think that embedded within impression and judgment are complexes of other processes; impressions are managed by various kinds of filtering; judgment is managed by experience and genetic propensities. I do not see these things a unique to the stoic.

Gary:

Few people, if any, comprehend that this purely is born out of self-interest because in really, materially, logically, the only person you can directly understand is yourself and yourself only.

RICHARD SANSOM:

I have serious problems with this thesis, and even see it as one of the key elements in the far right ideology of the dominance of ME, or I. I truly believe that though self interest is surely quite important as an essential part of our animal survival nature, we can and do to a very large degree understand others via a fundamental sense of empathy. While we cannot know anothers exact thoughts, we perceive the other as a human very much like ourselves in more respects than not. I believe that the evolution of hominids was greatly influenced by a growing sense of empathy that eventually allowed for larger more protecting communities I recently heard some prominent anthropologist comment on the strong possibility that at some point in our hominid evolution we gathered in ever larger groups and, eventually becoming settled communities that developed a collective defense against other, less settled groups. IMO this could not have occurred without strong person-to-person bonding through empathy. And this suggests that, personal safety not withstanding, group safety became instilled in our species. This could not have happened had we all simply put ourselves first in all situations of life..

I believe that when we encounter others we perceive pieces of them – large and small. It is the large pieces with which we connect at a deep level – and by connect, I mean understand. While we can never know all the details of those large pieces, the magnitude and general content is usually understood.

Gary:

In my earlier letter, I brought in the problem of the absolute lack of any mathematical/logical foundation of ethics, that any such ethics depends upon the rhetorical persuasion, a logic itself but a purely contingent logic, based on various different kinds of comparison. Most such persuasions are dependent primarily on Richards *social consensus*. But even a limited *social consensus* has many variables within itself which are supported by majorities and minorities - it is never a unified *thing* at all, not in the slightest. So any *persuasion* - usually - must appeal to the predominant majorities in any one *social consensus* over the minorities. In times of crisis, however, appealing to one minoritys view as providing a solution to a problem the majority views could not solve might provide a phronemos - you should have read Dreyfus short article - with the fulcrum to move the whole of the *social consensus* in a direction it otherwise probably would not have taken in the natural course of events. Such a phronemos, wise man, expert moral advisor is Adolf Hitler. Something to think about, especially since Dreyfus primary approach to this problem is Pragmatist and Aristotelian.

RICHARD SANSOM:

You say: Most such persuasions are dependent primarily on Richards *social consensus*. But even a limited *social consensus* has many variables within itself which are supported by majorities and minorities - it is never a unified *thing* at all, not in the slightest. I see what you mean here, but again, I disagree to a point. Saying *not in the slightest* is going a bit too far. I have the strong belief that were a set of questions put to all peoples on the earth, at least in the modern era, they would get unqualified answers of yes: Such questions might be:

Is it wrong in your culture to torture or kill children? Do you prefer to get along with your neighbors and avoid conflict and war? Do you believe that in general there is such a thing as fairness? Do you believe that you should not be enslaved? Do you believe that your laws and governance should stem from the consensus of your community? Do you believe that a suffering human should be helped? [there are many more like this]

If I am correct in my assumption of the yes answers to these questions, then there IS a united *thing* among us as humans. This might be seen as some kind of culturally created moral substrate, but it also might be seen simply as part of how we have evolved as a surviving species.

***

RICHARD SANSOM: I must admit that in the greater scheme of the cosmos [whatever that scheme might be] I find concerns about what is *bad* and *good* to be nonsensical concerns.

***

GARY.C. MOORE:For any human being of the present day and age, it is utterly beyond them to seriously contemplate any *scheme of the cosmos* which would involve tremendous advances in technology, first, and them a scheme of thought that might comprehend what technology discovers. This is not a legitimate philosophical or theological field of thought. Technology, here, comes first, no matter what. And there are no plausible hypotheses that can be constructed at this time. Rather, what is important is to think what it means to a human mind to truly understand all the consequences of that fact.

RICHARD SANSOM:

I used my reference to a *greater scheme of the cosmos* rather facetiously, since I do not believe there IS such a scheme, but I used it to point out that within the vastness of cosmic reality, truth, meaning, etc. the terms *bad* and *good* are without any meaning, in the same way that any human utterance is ultimately without meaning. And even that remark is, in the end, without meaning. At the end of the day I am a very serious skeptic – something I am not all that happy about.

***

RICHARD SANSOM: Of course we have these moral issues, and must live our lives according to this and that calculus of *betterment, * *pleasure,* *pain,*
*reward,* and all the other emotional factors that come into play.

***

GARY.C. MOORE:*Come into play* precisely describes a *found object* situation.

*** GARY.C. MOORE:But are *emotional factors* legitimately *moral issues*?

*** RICHARD SANSOM: Gary, might it be the case that emotional factors are the ONLY legitimate moral issues? If one begins and ends a moral argument by an appeal to anything of the mind that is NOT of an emotional nature, what is it that comprises such a position? Deductive or inductive logic?

***

GARY.C. MOORE:
Broadly what you say is perfectly obvious. But *emotional factors* have a logical hierarchy of importance - 1] the individual life; 2] close family; 3] extended family; 4] fiends and acquaintances; 5] people of the same locale; 6] people with economic or political power; 7] political authorities superseded all the above, and on and on. *One should sacrifice ones life for ones country*, *One should always obey legitimate leaders*, etc. *One should always love and protect ones wife*. All of these ethical
*emotional factors* very often come into violent conflict with each other which ethical formulae try to smooth over in favor of the more powerful *emotional factor* of which none of these have any real rational agreement. So it goes back once again to ethics as mere rag-tag *social consensus* with no rational coherence whatsoever, merely a *found thing* one is born into.

RICHARD SANSOM:
You fairly accurately describe what I have called *circles of empathy,* in your hierarchy. But I am not sure I agree that they are all *found* *rag-tag social consensus.* I believe that to a large degree they reside in our hominid genetic matrix. We are social animals in the same manner that we are language users – granted that our social interactions and conformance to the *social consensus* are acquired, they are acquired much as we acquire language; we have the innate propensity to arrange and fit into the *social consensus.* It is all part of our human species.