Open Letter to My Fellow Philosophically Minded Sufferers

Actually written JUNE 6, 2023 In this writing I will show an example of one of the failed arguments for morality, the one where a base-level moral ought extends a meta-level moral ought. [See my catalogue of failed arguments for morality, wherein  levels of "ought"  are discussed - in "Premise 3".] The meta-level extension is clever sophistry to disguise an equivocation of musts. [I recommend you read my previous writing on The Equivocation of Musts  - explaining explicable versus inexplicable musts.] I’ve come up with a more elucidating name for this particular kind of meta-level extending sophistry. I call it “cognitive prerequisite bating”. It works like this: 1. Point out that in order to discover whether moral realism is true, one must use reason. We acknowledge that reason is a cognitive prerequisite for discovering whether moral realism is true. 2. Equivocate this explicable cognitive prerequisite “must” with the inexplicable moral “must”. The fact that ...

Actually written JULY 23, 2023 I suspect that arguments for moral realism are, well, like this: make what amounts to a bold, unsupportable assertion that morality really exists, but disguise it as something other than a bold assertion. Throw in a bunch of sophistry. Then we can at least have a circular argument. For all a circular argument is, is a bold assertion pretending not to be a bold assertion. And yet there is a more advanced technique often used, the technique I call the “equivocation of musts”. Like circularity, equivocation is a logical error. And as with circularity, the equivocation is more convincing if you can hide it under some decent sophistry. And I want to explain all this. But I find that I must first review the fundamental feature of morality: the idea of a way things were meant to be, from which is derived the idea of making our behavior comply with the way things were meant to be, i.e. of doing what we morally must do - our duty. So now I’ll elaborate on the fou...

Actually written FEBRUARY 4, 2010 Noddings on page 126 is summarized, her stance on moral rationalism again. Moreover, rationality alone can lead to suppression of the emotion of compassion, the motivation to reach out to the world of the one suffering. Such logical extension can then result in noncaring or apathy; one becomes detached, free, untouched by suffering. Noddings (1984, 8) associates such a detached state with the ethics of principles and justifications, versus an ethic of caring and responsibility. (Jean Watson, “Human Caring and Suffering: A Subjective Model for Health Sciences” in They Shall Not Hurt , P126.) It inspires the following objection from me: Noddings attempts to take morality away from Kantian “rationalism” (deontological-ness) and reduce morality to sentiment – to benevolence. She is like Alonzo Fyfe here. And my objection against Alonzo also holds against Nel (Nel Noddings). No. It is a mistake to redefine morality as benevolence (or compassion) as per Nod...

Actually written DECEMBER 7, 2008 I recently read a book called A Better Place… Selected Essays On Desire Utilitarianism , by Alonzo Fyfe. I read the book because someone examined the MySpace page I made for my philosophy called “Secular Benevolism” and recommended I look into an ideology called “Desire Utilitarianism”, the premise being that the two ideologies are very similar. So here are my initial thoughts. Desire Utilitarianism (DU from now on) and Secular Benevolism (SB from now on) do seem very similar to me. They both seem essentially concerned to increase the gratification of all our strongest motivations (desires and aversions). How deeply this similarity runs is still under my investigation. Not only that, but the creator of DU, Alonzo Fyfe, includes a brief biographical sketch of his motivation for creating it. And as I read this sketch, I felt an instant kinship with him. Here’s his sketch: When I was 16 years old, sitting in a high-school history class, I decided that I w...

Actually written JANUARY 17, 2008 DJ BENEVOLENCE: OK I’m here interviewing 2 crazy cats, some imaginary characters I made up. I dreamed these guys up because I think they go a long way toward explaining the distinction between benevolence and morality. These 2 crazy cats are Nazis. So before I let them speak, I’d like to make perfectly clear that yours truly, DJ Benevolence, is not a Nazi. I do in fact denounce Nazi-ism on the grounds that it expresses too much malevolence and cruelty. In fact, it is precisely because Nazi-ism is so strongly associated with both malevolence and moral evil that I designed these 2 cats as Nazis. Nazis are convenient as classic villains in any ideological discussion. But these 2 guys are special. They suffer a psychological abnormality so unique that they are among the only 12 or so people in the entire world who do have it. The abnormality is called “Drive Category Conflict” or “Drive Category Schizophrenia”.  It means these guys have a kind of inne...

Actually written APRIL 30, 2005 -  The central question in epistemology has inspired many transcendental (beyond sense perception) answers, to the extent that “transcendental” seem to be the only answers available. Pragmatists, seeing transcendental answers as rationalizations in the service of malevolence, reject the very question at its root as being too dangerous. “Shut up. Bond with us and stop philosophizing.”, they beg. Perhaps it is well established that any answer to the question of how a mind can have a veridical grasp of existence will necessarily appear transcendental, even if it is not. This necessary appearance condemns all answers. The pragmatist has a point. Suppose one answer is not transcendental, but only appears so. And suppose this answer, by appearing so, is used as a rationalization for malevolence, just as with all the others. It may make sense, then, to throw this baby out with the bathwater in the name of benevolence. And could such a true, yet dangerous, a...

Actually written SEPTEMBER 21, 2000 - Corporate Accountability means Supply Chain Accountability. The modern goods we enjoy are made by complex levels of manufacturing integration distributed over a chain of several corporations. No single corporation makes the whole thing from start to finish, but instead supplies parts to the next link in the manufacturing chain. This is the supply chain. Unfortunately, the supply chain currently allows corporate participants to “pass the buck” on accountability to benevolence/malevolence parameters. The sheer complexity of the supply chain (more like a supply network ) prohibits the collection and processing of benevolence/malevolence data on each corporate participant. This is what we call “Supply Chain Blindness”, as in, “We are ‘blind’ to the benevolence/malevolence of those who supply the parts from which we make our gadgets.” For example, consider the good intentions of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream makers. While they claim the ability to evaluat...