Smoking Crow posted:

Goons have no reason to condescend to anything, in my honest opinion.

Smoking Crow posted:

Goons have no reason to condescend to anything, in my honest opinion.

Smoking Crow posted:

Let's take a moment out of our discussion to agree on one thing. is the worst smilie on these forums and everyone would appreciate it if you didn't use it.

SedanChair posted:

It is the personification of responses to your idiocy.

blatman posted:

Is this thread still about men thinking they are allowed to have opinions about abortions or is it about religious dictatorships or what

Smoking Crow posted:

Let's take a moment out of our discussion to agree on one thing. is the worst smilie on these forums and everyone would appreciate it if you didn't use it.

SedanChair posted:

You get drunk? What happened to willfully controlling your behavior?

Do you think Jesus thinks it's better to get drunk than it is to let throbbing cocktips pierce your sphincter?

buttcoin smuggler posted:

Right, sure. The burden is on anybody trying to bridge the is/ought gap to show that their proposal works. I totally agree. But there is also a burden of proof on someone who claims that the is/ought gap is impossible to bridge. That is a very controversial claim that requires justification.

This was the claim I took Rudatron to be making. He/she said it was a "basic result of philosophical inquiry" that one cannot get from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones, seeming to imply that their impossibility claim was universally held and not controversial. I apologize if I misinterpreted that comment.

buttcoin smuggler posted:

I have an opinion on abortion if you want to talk about it.

I don't see why men shouldn't have them too. It's a deep issue with huge ethical and practical consequences.

blatman posted:

Men don't get to have opinions about abortions until they have a uterus, is the thing

blatman posted:

I don't think you know what a uterus is

Kyrie eleison posted:

It turns out that I'm actually really, really bad at willfully controlling my behavior.

Kyrie eleison posted:

I don't think homosexuals are any kind of threat. I'm just saying that I feel I have a responsibility to procreate which is ultimately greater than my desire to fulfill my homosexual desires.

quote:

I am not interested in forcing you to do anything. I do not believe in hate, cruelty, or anything of the sort. And, of course, I do not want anyone to commit suicide or to feel psychologically tortured, I'm not sure why you think that.

buttcoin smuggler posted:

My view this this: I agree that "is" and "ought" statements are different things. However, I don't think it's impossible to show an "is" statement implies an "ought" statement (at least on the basis of what has been said so far in this thread).

The point is that trotting out "is cannot imply ought" as if it were some unquestionable, or even widely agreed, truth is basic error, and I wanted to correct it.

VitalSigns posted:

Homosexuals can marry each other and procreate or adopt. And before you poo poo on other people's families, go ahead and mentally replace "gay" with "black", and think about how hosed up it would be to say that interracial marriages are fundamentally disordered and how you fear for the children of those unnatural unions.

quote:

Gay people have to spend their whole lives hearing about how they are inferior and should choose to be straight if they want to be moral. Sorry your religion did that to you, it's terrible I know, maybe you could not perpetuate it?

ShadowCatboy posted:

"Is" can shape "ought" statements, much as how an understanding of a disease shapes the decisionmaking process of how it should be treated, or even whether it is necessary to treat. However, the idea that prescriptive statements can be derived from descriptive ones is a pretty bold proposition due to their categorical differences.

Do you have any actual arguments regarding why we should give the idea of ethical naturalism any serious consideration? Because otherwise it just sounds almost as unsupported as "look maybe a contradiction CAN exist, and the law of non-contradiction !(A = !A) isn't absolute."

Kyrie eleison posted:

I suppose that thing about race would be true but I mean that's just not a Catholic teaching and never has been,

quote:

I love my fellow homosexual people and sometimes have sex with them.

Smoking Crow posted:

Let's take a moment out of our discussion to agree on one thing. is the worst smilie on these forums and everyone would appreciate it if you didn't use it.

BrandorKP posted:

quote:

And the same can be said about religious thought. And these chains of thought really overlap.

quote:

I would say they want a different foundational idea. And they are engaging in (and I like your phrasing of this) "an ideological battle with material political goals" and if we miss the nature of what they are doing, the conversation becomes about specific details of the systematics being correct or not. If you write them off because the system is poo poo (and it usually is) you can miss what is going on. One systematic has been taken hollowed out and another foundation has been jammed in. It is a mistake to not take that seriously.

rudatron posted:

Your use of apocalypse here is also strange. If any great ideological shift is necessarily an apocalypse, then doesn't that kind of devalue what an actual apocalypse is? Or even a catastrope? Perhaps from inside any given ideology, a shift away from that ideology must necessarily be a terrible thing. But you think that something with that kind of language, would be based a society-wide understanding of catastrophe? These writings are meant to be read by others outside that community, right? If he's engaging in what you say he is, then I think that's actually much worse then if he was doing what I say he was!

buttcoin smuggler posted:

I don't personally have any arguments to present in favor of ethical naturalism, because I haven't thought about this stuff in a long time. If you'd like a reference, section 4 of this encyclopedia entry describes three contemporary naturalist positions and gives a bibliography. It's a fairly mainstream, respectable position.

However, my point isn't that ethical naturalism is a great theory. I'm only claiming that we shouldn't blithely dismiss any position that attempts to bridge the is/ought gap without considering that argument on its merits.

buttcoin smuggler posted:

As the SEP entry notes, it depends on how broadly you interpret the term 'ethical naturalism.' Here's a blurb from the Wikipedia entry on the is-ought problem, which is perhaps clearer.

buttcoin smuggler posted:

I believe Neo-Aristotelians get around this by arguing that humans have some inherent purpose (derived from certain natural facts about humans, as in Aristotle's original function argument).

The purpose of an axe, is, among other things, to cut stuff. We condemn dull axes as bad axes because they do not cut things well. An axe ought to be sharp.

Neo-Aristotelians will argue that in order for humans to fulfill their purpose, they ought to act virtuously.

Miltank posted:

The quote was from Ethics, which is a compilation of Bonhoeffer's writings that were spared the gestapo. Nothing in Ethics or Letters from Prison was meant to be published as far as I know.

Also, As I pointed out earlier, the context of the void is the disunity of Christendom via nationalism and total war.

buttcoin smuggler posted:

I don't know if you saw it, but I edited it in a link to a review of a book attacking the fact/value distinction a few posts ago. That's probably a better response to your request for positive reasons to be skeptical of the prescriptive/descriptive statement distinction.

Also I'm confused now. You were worried before about the "ought" being of "prescriptive value" but that seems to me to be shifting the goalposts a bit. Why doesn't the following suffice to show we can get from "is" to "ought"?

1) Sharp axes are better at cutting than dull axes.
2) In order to cut things well, an axe ought to be sharp.