I never accepted what they said. I lost interest long ago.
Is a Public Philosophy Still Possible?
- Thread starter Hume
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Obtenebrator
Verified User
Excellent.
T. A. Gardner
Thread Killer
It does when we are talking about humans!
A universal within the class humans. That is logical.
Is murder wrong under all circumstances? What if someone takes out a mass murderer?
Good question.
It is limited in the context of this discussion, and that is totally allowed by the dictionary definition of Universal.
Lions, armadillos, and mayflies do not have an objective sense of values, morality; and their brains aren't even designed to conceive of ontological reality, transcendence, the quadratic equation, the Pythagorean theorem, or the natural laws of the universe.
The pricetag of atheism is a reductionist materialism, and belief in a subjective morality based on opinion or the popular vote.
Therefore, I'm really surprised an atheist would start a thread saying Socrates should be our teacher, when the Socrates of the Platonic dialogues definitely believed that there were objectively true things about values and virtues independent of human opinion or whim, that we could discover through reason and dialectic.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
You have yet to explain why you have created an arbitrary subset of a larger set and then decreed it to be "universal".
Obtenebrator
Verified User
Disagree. Humans are merely one subset of "animalia".
You cannot arbitrarily break up a set and then decree that something that ONLY applies to one arbitrary subset is "universal".
I don't necessarily disagree, but I will note you cannot make that claim. You have NO WAY to know the content of animal minds.
You just can't.
How on EARTH do you know this? This is just you making a made-up claim. You have NO EVIDENCE, and NO WAY to know this claim.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
Probably wouldn't be technically "murder". Killing a killer would be a form of "defense" or "self-defense". Murder is often defined as being against an innocent victim.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
I disagree with this arbitrary definition of the set.
It is like saying "X is universal to Bob Smith."
Humans are a subset of animals. In order for morality to be "universal" and have some "meaning" (remember: the whole point of decreeing morality to be a "universal truth" is to remove human caprice from the definition).
To say "morality is a universal truth" but ONLY for humans one may as well just say "Humans made up morality". Making it purely relative to humans and NOT a universal concept.
He meant the universal of class humans.
No, I am just talking simple logic. In the class of cars, four wheels is a universal. Just rhetoric.
I guess that's why the TV series Dexter was so popular. But unless it is actually self defense, in a society with laws, it's obviously forbidden to take the law into how own hands.
I'm really amazed that this even has to be explained to anyone.
Universal principles, as they apply to human beings, has been part of the public discourse at least since the Enlightenment, if not earlier.
No functioning human thinks the concepts of universal healthcare, universal declarations of human rights, or universal suffrage applies to lemurs, salamanders, or cyanobacteria.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
So then we can all agree morality is something humans merely made up.
But the whole point of the exercise is to establish morality as something BEYOND mere human convention.
If you say something is "universal" as a means of defining it as something OTHER than a mere human convention it is hardly valuable to then point out that in this case "universal" ONLY means "associated with humans".
That seems like the DEFINITION of something that is made up by humans. In other words: not universal by any stretch.
"We" don't all agree. But I said morality is conventional from the beginning.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
I find it interesting that it has to be explained to you that the claim "Morality is universal" as a means of making it something MORE than a mere human-invented concept is really undercut when the term "universal" is then defined as ONLY RELATING TO HUMANS.
When one says "universal suffrage" that's fine insofar as it is to apply only to humans. But no one is arguing that "suffrage" is anything other than a human-invented concept.
In the case of morality the reason people prefer a "universal" definition of morality is to remove it from the realm of MERE HUMAN INVENTION. To then claim that the word then only applies to humans kind of undercuts the whole point.
Obtenebrator
Verified User
I doubt I have a significant debate with your position at all.
No. I was just talking formality of logic, linguistics.