Jokes about prison rape on men? Not a fan.

[blastula]

Feisty thread. Wouldn't want to drop the soap around here, if you know what I mean, wink.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Feisty thread. Wouldn't want to drop the soap around here, if you know what I mean, wink.

Well done, Sir

 

[ruby sparks]

.... religious/ideologue/angry often fails to listen.

This seems to be one of your favourite claims when debating with others. You use it quite a lot.

 

[ruby sparks]

It was tried in USA and didn't work for whatever reason.

I think you need to back that up a lot more than you have done so far. The suggestion that the USA engaged in such 'enlightened, soft-landing' policies and that they resulted in increased crime and greatly increased prison populations is genuinely new to me. On the face of it, it seems that the prison population rose dramatically during or after a time when they...what...weren't putting people in prison so readily, or for so long, or what?

I know nothing about the claims regarding lead poisoning.

Oh, look. I found my source itself available on the net. As you can see it's quite complicated with a variety of factors not easy to sum up in a short forum post.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig...ilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext

edit: bottom line, we need social mechanics with which to whip violent young men into line early. Without it they will lead a life of crime. It's completely analogous to the social mechanics among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can only afford one alpha male. So once one male is dominant, the rest of the flock conspire to whip the others in line. Bonobos are similar, but there the females conspire to also whip the alpha male in line. Just a bit less than the other males.

In the 1960'ies and the movement of free love we dismanteled these social mechanics, a part of that was the prison reforms. Which in USA went bad immediately. I put that down to the entrepenourial spirit of USA. The entire culture revolvs around getting a husstle and exploiting holes in the market, in a way we don't have in Europe. Here's it's generally frowned upon not to be obedient and do what it's expected of you. Especially in places like Scandinavia.

First, thank you for the citation.

It seems to support what you say at least partially. There is not that much to show that 'legal leniency' (or whatever we call the sorts of policies that Norway enacted) was a big factor, and most of the article is devoted to other things. But it is implied in that article that courts were more reluctant to incarcerate, yes. Actually, I would like to read about that in more detail. It is not something I had heard before. I had heard that society was more permissive, but not the courts (especially not when it came to black people, but that is probably a slightly separate issue here in some ways).

Also, Pinker is not the last word. Here, for example, is an article suggesting his ideas in that book are fatally flawed:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/tr...e-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/

And of course there is the book I posted a chapter of earlier, which has quite a different view.

So beware of taking your conclusions from a limited number of sources.

One thing that does strike me is that you are content to say that similar approaches were taken in Norway and the USA (I think you called it the comparative experiment) but it seems, even from reading the Pinker article, that what happened in the USA was quite different in many ways. So I think it's inconsistent of you to favourably compare the two in one sense but then say they are irreconcilably different in another.

My own view, having now looked into this a bit more, is to be agnostic. Jarhyn's 'lead poisoning' explanation seems as plausible as yours (and I do accept that you have a point, I just think you should neither overstate it or rush to a conclusion about it) as does one I had read previously, as expounded by Stephen Levitt in the book 'Freakonomics' that had to do with a different explanation (arising from the legalising of abortion). In a nutshell, there seem to be many competing explanations, and I wouldn't myself feel sure about picking one of them. I think it's bound to be more complicated that that, so I would keep an open mind.

 

[Jarhyn]

Oh, look. I found my source itself available on the net. As you can see it's quite complicated with a variety of factors not easy to sum up in a short forum post.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig...ilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext

edit: bottom line, we need social mechanics with which to whip violent young men into line early. Without it they will lead a life of crime. It's completely analogous to the social mechanics among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can only afford one alpha male. So once one male is dominant, the rest of the flock conspire to whip the others in line. Bonobos are similar, but there the females conspire to also whip the alpha male in line. Just a bit less than the other males.

In the 1960'ies and the movement of free love we dismanteled these social mechanics, a part of that was the prison reforms. Which in USA went bad immediately. I put that down to the entrepenourial spirit of USA. The entire culture revolvs around getting a husstle and exploiting holes in the market, in a way we don't have in Europe. Here's it's generally frowned upon not to be obedient and do what it's expected of you. Especially in places like Scandinavia.

First, thank you for the citation.

It seems to support what you say at least partially. There is not that much to show that 'legal leniency' (or whatever we call the sorts of policies that Norway enacted) was a big factor, and most of the article is devoted to other things. But it is implied in that article that courst were more reluctant to incarcerate, yes. Actually, I would like to read about that in more detail. It is not something I had heard before. I had heard that society was more permissive, but not the courts.

Also, Pinker is not the last word. Here, for example, is an article suggesting his ideas in that book are fatally flawed:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/tr...e-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/

And of course there is the book I posted a chapter of earlier, which has quite a different view.

So beware of taking your conclusions from a limited number of sources.

One thing that does strike me is that you are content to say that similar approaches were taken in Norway and the USA (I think you called it the comparative experiment) but it seems, even from reading the Pinker article, that what happened in the USA was quite different in many ways. So I think it's inconsistent of you to favourably compare the two in one sense but then say they are irreconcilably different in another.

My own view, having now looked into this a bit more, is to be agnostic. Jarhyn's 'lead poisoning' explanation seems as plausible as yours (and I do accept that you have a point, I just think you should neither overstate it or rush to a conclusion about it) as does one I had read previously, as expounded by Stephen Levitt in the book 'Freakonomics' that had to do with a different explanation (arising from the legalising of abortion). In a nutshell, there seem to be many competing explanations, and I wouldn't myself feel sure about picking one of them. I think it's bound to be more complicated that that, so I would keep an open mind.

"As plausible". Lead is a 90+% correlation that holds internationally, right down to the neighborhood level, not merely echoing the overall line, but echoing the exceptions in exposure.

It is already known with clinical certainty that lead has the effects documented.

We have an effect that correlates with exposure and a documented causal link between exposure and result. What more do you want, a talking bar of lead walking into a police station and signing a full confession?

The question is, if I were to correct for "the lead effect", how does DZ's claim correlate with the remaining variance? Because while their claims put together a bunch of proposed causes to construct an explanation of the data, there is always the possibility that the remaining curve shows that the effect of remaining factors exacerbates the problem instead.

But I don't think he's going to pony up because that's a lot of work.

And for the record, when it comes to intractably violent people, oftentimes "denying opportunity" is going to have the same general appearance as incarceration, albeit with a focus on NOT being shitty to them, even when we "feel" like they "deserve" it.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Oh, look. I found my source itself available on the net. As you can see it's quite complicated with a variety of factors not easy to sum up in a short forum post.

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig...ilization-in-the-1960s?rgn=main;view=fulltext

edit: bottom line, we need social mechanics with which to whip violent young men into line early. Without it they will lead a life of crime. It's completely analogous to the social mechanics among chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can only afford one alpha male. So once one male is dominant, the rest of the flock conspire to whip the others in line. Bonobos are similar, but there the females conspire to also whip the alpha male in line. Just a bit less than the other males.

In the 1960'ies and the movement of free love we dismanteled these social mechanics, a part of that was the prison reforms. Which in USA went bad immediately. I put that down to the entrepenourial spirit of USA. The entire culture revolvs around getting a husstle and exploiting holes in the market, in a way we don't have in Europe. Here's it's generally frowned upon not to be obedient and do what it's expected of you. Especially in places like Scandinavia.

First, thank you for the citation.

It seems to support what you say at least partially. There is not that much to show that 'legal leniency' (or whatever we call the sorts of policies that Norway enacted) was a big factor, and most of the article is devoted to other things. But it is implied in that article that courst were more reluctant to incarcerate, yes. Actually, I would like to read about that in more detail. It is not something I had heard before.

Also, Pinker is not the last word. Here, for example, is an article suggesting his ideas in that book are fatally flawed:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/tr...e-fatally-flawed-these-eight-graphs-show-why/

And of course there is the book I posted a chapter of earlier, which has quite a different view.

meh... this is just the standard lazy leftist attack on anything that doesn't affirm our sacred leftist tenets. It makes me sad when leftists don't understand Marx. This is a conservative type analysis using the Great Man reading of history but overlain with leftist tropes. Ie, seeing what you want to see. This is an incredibly lazy attack on capitalism IMHO, and then the baby goes with the bathwater. I strongly dislike the woke "what about the blacks"-slant. As if Pinker had forgotten about them. He didn't. It's a lazy attack on him.

Yes, it's fair to say that Pinker is overly optimistic. Yes, obviously progress doesn't mean progress for everyone. That is not a profound statement and nothing Pinker has claimed.

The main problem with the decline of violence in the modern west is that the same society underwent the most dramatic social and economic transformation in human history. There's a lot of moving parts. Any explanation, no matter how much detail you add, will always, in some way, be simplistic, and miss things. So to have that as a demand is stupid.

So beware of taking your conclusions from a limited number of sources.

I used to agree with you and make the same arguments as you. On this forum. It's the other way around. It's the leftist narrative that takes conclusions from a limited number of sources. They/we so desperately want this to be true, that we're willing to ignore reality. There's many sacred cows for the left that make us... frankly... stupid.

One thing that does strike me is that you are content to say that similar approaches were taken in Norway and the USA (I think you called it the comparative experiment) but it seems, even from reading the Pinker article, that what happened in the USA was quite different in many ways. So I think it's inconsistent of you to favourably compare the two in one sense but then say they are irreconcilably different in another.

We had the same cultural liberal and progressive movement all over the west. USA tried to liberalise best they could, and so did Norway. With strong popular support. And this is how far they got. That's what I mean by that it was tried in both countries.

My own view, having now looked into this a bit more, is to be agnostic. Jarhyn's 'lead poisoning' explanation seems as plausible as yours (and I do accept that you have a point, I just think you should neither overstate it or rush to a conclusion about it) as does one I had read previously, as expounded by Stephen Levitt in the book 'Freakonomics' that had to do with a different explanation (arising from the legalising of abortion). In a nutshell, there seem to be many competing explanations, and I wouldn't myself feel sure about picking one of them. I think it's bound to be more complicated that that, so I would keep an open mind.

Yes, there's many competing explanations and the truth will be some mix between them... obviously. I also believe in the abortion theory. Because it's supported by evidence.

My personal theory is that humans are just a bunch of clever monkeys and will behave like monkeys. Just with the ability to be more sneaky and sophisticated about it. Since humans is a primate, I'd say any theory that doesn't include primate instincts is special pleading, ie good ol' religious human specialness. That's why I like Pinker. He includes it in his theory. But I don't treat him like the prophet on this. I just like him... now. Until something better comes along.

 

[ruby sparks]

"As plausible". Lead is a 90+% correlation that holds internationally, right down to the neighborhood level, not merely echoing the overall line, but echoing the exceptions in exposure.

It is already known with clinical certainty that lead has the effects documented.

We have an effect that correlates with exposure and a documented causal link between exposure and result. What more do you want, a talking bar of lead walking into a police station and signing a full confession?

The question is, if I were to correct for "the lead effect", how does DZ's claim correlate with the remaining variance? Because while their claims put together a bunch of proposed causes to construct an explanation of the data, there is always the possibility that the remaining curve shows that the effect of remaining factors exacerbates the problem instead.

But I don't think he's going to pony up because that's a lot of work.

And for the record, when it comes to intractably violent people, oftentimes "denying opportunity" is going to have the same general appearance as incarceration, albeit with a focus on NOT being shitty to them, even when we "feel" like they "deserve" it.

Honestly, I really do not feel I am in any position to say which of the two explanations, or any other, is the correct one, or whether they all partially contribute.

 

[ruby sparks]

meh... this is just the standard lazy leftist attack on anything that doesn't affirm our sacred leftist tenets.

I really don't think it's reasonable to say that's what it is.

 

[Bomb#20]

Honestly, it's some serious Dunning-Krueger territory to ever bring up how smart you are(n't) in a conversation. Or to try to claim how smart someone else is.

Um, no, the latter is not what Dunning and Kruger were on about.

Just, never try to claim you or anyone else is particularly "smart". It's a bad look.

Let's review the bidding, shall we? I brought it up in the first place because you wrote:

I honestly wonder at this point whether AM has, at some point, assaulted and/or killed someone.

That is a jack-ass thing to write about another poster. You are in no position to lecture others about what's a "bad look". You have a smug patronizing tendency to present yourself as some sort of superior life form whose role in this world is to drag the rest of us kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages. You needed to be reminded that other people are not the cartoon characters of your self-congratulatory fantasies.

The rest of it was just laughing dog's and my ever-recurring dynamic of taking snarky potshots at each other's posts, and should be ignored by everyone else.

 

[Jarhyn]

Um, no, the latter is not what Dunning and Kruger were on about.


Let's review the bidding, shall we? I brought it up in the first place because you wrote:

I honestly wonder at this point whether AM has, at some point, assaulted and/or killed someone.

That is a jack-ass thing to write about another poster. You are in no position to lecture others about what's a "bad look". You have a smug patronizing tendency to present yourself as some sort of superior life form whose role in this world is to drag the rest of us kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages. You needed to be reminded that other people are not the cartoon characters of your self-congratulatory fantasies.

The rest of it was just laughing dog's and my ever-recurring dynamic of taking snarky potshots at each other's posts, and should be ignored by everyone else.

Ah, I see, you don't like other people showing you how you look bad. If you don't want other people to comment on how bad a look you shine on yourself, maybe quit shining a palor on yourself. Maybe take it to DM if you want to avoid comments from the peanut gallery.

I'm not going to apologise for pointing out how bad you make yourself look.

 

[Metaphor]

Um, no, the latter is not what Dunning and Kruger were on about.


Let's review the bidding, shall we? I brought it up in the first place because you wrote:

I honestly wonder at this point whether AM has, at some point, assaulted and/or killed someone.

That is a jack-ass thing to write about another poster. You are in no position to lecture others about what's a "bad look". You have a smug patronizing tendency to present yourself as some sort of superior life form whose role in this world is to drag the rest of us kicking and screaming out of the Middle Ages. You needed to be reminded that other people are not the cartoon characters of your self-congratulatory fantasies.

The rest of it was just laughing dog's and my ever-recurring dynamic of taking snarky potshots at each other's posts, and should be ignored by everyone else.

Ah, I see, you don't like other people showing you how you look bad. If you don't want other people to comment on how bad a look you shine on yourself, maybe quit shining a palor on yourself. Maybe take it to DM if you want to avoid comments from the peanut gallery.

I'm not going to apologise for pointing out how bad you make yourself look.

You won't apologise and you won't stop, because you're a retributionist.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Even if the prevalence of retributive urges was as pronounced and widespread as you say (and I think you overstate and oversimplify a complex situation to at least some extent) it is still a jump to claiming universal, independent morally realist rightness for them. I have called it the naturalistic fallacy and getting an ought from an is, and you have quibbled about that with much of your usual hair-splitting precision, but in essence, it's effectively what it more or less is.

a. It would be an error to try to derive a conclusion containing a moral statement from consistent premises that do not use any moral terms (i.e., no 'immoral', 'morally permissible', 'morally good', 'just', etc.) and by that I mean derive them by means of a deductive argument. The argument would either be invalid, or have implicit premises containing false claims about the meaning of some moral terms.
However, there is no similar error (or any other) in making probabilistic assessments - even probable enough to be beyond a reasonable doubt - about moral facts, using information that can be stated in non-moral facts. In particular, it is proper to use one's own moral sense to make those assessments. This is what humans properly do nearly all of the time. But additionally, it is also proper to use information based on observations of other humans, and what their respective moral senses say.

If you disagree with 1., please explain why.

b. The people who oppose retribution are also making moral claims and/or implications. In particular, they claim that their proposed system is better, and they also claim or imply that those who believe retribution is deserved or just are mistaken. Of course, they can only make those assessments using information that contains no moral statements, or else there is a chain that leads to that.


c. I already explained that your "naturalistic fallacy" or "ought from and is" objection fails, or else hits every moral assessment made by every human ever. Let us see why:

Suppose A says B behaved immorally when he did X.
1. If A uses her own moral sense to make the assessment, then her assessment falls within the scope of your 'naturalistic fallacy' or 'is-ought' problem, because it does not logically follow from the fact that A's moral sense gives the verdict 'B's doing X was immoral', that B's doing X was immoral.
2. If A uses the moral sense of other humans, then the same holds.
3. If A derives her judgment from some moral premises P1, ...Pn , and some other premises Q, then the question is: How does A derive P1,..Pn.


As there is no infinite regress in A's argumentation or thought (she is human), then at some point A is basing her moral assessments on something that is not a moral premise. That falls afaul of your 'naturalistic fallacy', and taints the rest of the conclusions as they are based on an unwarranted starting point.


If you have any counterarguments at all, please state them, and I will explain why they fail.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

.... religious/ideologue/angry often fails to listen.

This seems to be one of your favourite claims when debating with others. You use it quite a lot.

I do use it quite a lot, though it happens far more often than I use it.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Ah, I see, you don't like other people showing you how you look bad. If you don't want other people to comment on how bad a look you shine on yourself, maybe quit shining a palor on yourself. Maybe take it to DM if you want to avoid comments from the peanut gallery.

I'm not going to apologise for pointing out how bad you make yourself look.

You won't apologise and you won't stop, because you're a retributionist.

Yes, well because of that and because he mistakenly believes B20 did something that deserves punishment, even though Jarhyn has no good reason to even suspect B20 did that.

Jarhyn is of course a retributivist, because he is human; no fault there. The problem is he is engaging in retribution for the wrong reasons, and does not realize that he is engaging in retribution.

 

[Angra Mainyu]

Here's even an example of a judgment that people deserve some punishment, in this case mild:


https://talkfreethought.org/showthread.php?16360-And-here-we-go-again&p=690294&viewfull=1#post690294

Update in the Patrick Kimmons case:
Man shot by friend in downtown Portland parking lot pleads guilty to being a felon with a gun

The "friend" in question is the dead guy Patrick Kimmons. He was shooting at somebody else, but also hit his friend and fellow Rolling 60 Crip in the thigh.

Nice guys all around. I can see why the Left in Portland would protest dindu Patrick Kimmons getting shot by police and then throw vegan "milk" shakes at anyone who disagrees.

Something racist fucks seem to have a hard time understanding: we can have both. Yes, Kimmons is a shitty person, and what made him that way is shitty. But nobody deserves to be shot, especially when they aren't shooting back. Sometimes people need to be shot, but they still don't deserve it. What everyone everywhere deserves is a good education, economic opportunities, and to enjoy the freedom to use whatever substances they fancy... So long as those substances do not weaponize them or enslave them.

This means that the people who did something were the people who criminalized his economic activity and community. They failed to respect his autonomy and freedom, or to support him like humans should be expected to do for each other.

For that, yeah, the cops deserve some milkshakes to the face. It's not like people are shooting and killing them simply because they buy and enjoy and engage in economic activity involving alcohol...

 

[ruby sparks]

Even if the prevalence of retributive urges was as pronounced and widespread as you say (and I think you overstate and oversimplify a complex situation to at least some extent) it is still a jump to claiming universal, independent morally realist rightness for them. I have called it the naturalistic fallacy and getting an ought from an is, and you have quibbled about that with much of your usual hair-splitting precision, but in essence, it's effectively what it more or less is.

a. It would be an error to try to derive a conclusion containing a moral statement from consistent premises that do not use any moral terms (i.e., no 'immoral', 'morally permissible', 'morally good', 'just', etc.) and by that I mean derive them by means of a deductive argument. The argument would either be invalid, or have implicit premises containing false claims about the meaning of some moral terms.
However, there is no similar error (or any other) in making probabilistic assessments - even probable enough to be beyond a reasonable doubt - about moral facts, using information that can be stated in non-moral facts. In particular, it is proper to use one's own moral sense to make those assessments. This is what humans properly do nearly all of the time. But additionally, it is also proper to use information based on observations of other humans, and what their respective moral senses say.

If you disagree with 1., please explain why.

b. The people who oppose retribution are also making moral claims and/or implications. In particular, they claim that their proposed system is better, and they also claim or imply that those who believe retribution is deserved or just are mistaken. Of course, they can only make those assessments using information that contains no moral statements, or else there is a chain that leads to that.


c. I already explained that your "naturalistic fallacy" or "ought from and is" objection fails, or else hits every moral assessment made by every human ever. Let us see why:

Suppose A says B behaved immorally when he did X.
1. If A uses her own moral sense to make the assessment, then her assessment falls within the scope of your 'naturalistic fallacy' or 'is-ought' problem, because it does not logically follow from the fact that A's moral sense gives the verdict 'B's doing X was immoral', that B's doing X was immoral.
2. If A uses the moral sense of other humans, then the same holds.
3. If A derives her judgment from some moral premises P1, ...Pn , and some other premises Q, then the question is: How does A derive P1,..Pn.


As there is no infinite regress in A's argumentation or thought (she is human), then at some point A is basing her moral assessments on something that is not a moral premise. That falls afaul of your 'naturalistic fallacy', and taints the rest of the conclusions as they are based on an unwarranted starting point.


If you have any counterarguments at all, please state them, and I will explain why they fail.

I hardly even know where to start with that. I would refer you back to previous times when I replied regarding those at length, both here and in previous threads, and explained why I think your arguments are flawed, particularly when taking human instincts to represent moral facts.

And if what I am saying hits all moralities, then in some ways, yes, that is exactly the point. Though as I said previously, it hits some harder than others, particularly the more dogmatic ones with strong claims to real, universal, independent moral facts that it is claimed are known by the person asserting them, such as yours.

I'm seeing quite a lot of your 'precision' as pedantry and sophistry that hides an underlying intransigence and presumption. And in an odd way, it reminds me in some ways at least of the ways academic and learned theologians go about their business. Endless 'precision', logic and convolution, even citing evidence, in order to arrive at conclusions already assumed. Which is why I think you should be careful about levelling such criticisms at others as if you were immune. There's none so blind as those who think only others can't see.

 

[ruby sparks]

Here's even an example of a judgment that people deserve some punishment, in this case mild:

By all means tell us your opinions. Opinions can be useful and reasonable, and I broadly think yours are both. Just ease back on claiming that you know that you are talking about real, independent, universal moral facts and that if anyone disagrees with you, they are mistaken. That's essentially your underlying dogma, or perhaps your ideology, possibly even your secular religion in some ways, imo.

 

[ruby sparks]

.... religious/ideologue/angry often fails to listen.

This seems to be one of your favourite claims when debating with others. You use it quite a lot.

I do use it quite a lot, though it happens far more often than I use it.

Maybe it does. Sometimes it may even be you doing it.

 

[Jarhyn]

Even if the prevalence of retributive urges was as pronounced and widespread as you say (and I think you overstate and oversimplify a complex situation to at least some extent) it is still a jump to claiming universal, independent morally realist rightness for them. I have called it the naturalistic fallacy and getting an ought from an is, and you have quibbled about that with much of your usual hair-splitting precision, but in essence, it's effectively what it more or less is.

a. It would be an error to try to derive a conclusion containing a moral statement from consistent premises that do not use any moral terms (i.e., no 'immoral', 'morally permissible', 'morally good', 'just', etc.) and by that I mean derive them by means of a deductive argument. The argument would either be invalid, or have implicit premises containing false claims about the meaning of some moral terms.
However, there is no similar error (or any other) in making probabilistic assessments - even probable enough to be beyond a reasonable doubt - about moral facts, using information that can be stated in non-moral facts. In particular, it is proper to use one's own moral sense to make those assessments. This is what humans properly do nearly all of the time. But additionally, it is also proper to use information based on observations of other humans, and what their respective moral senses say.

If you disagree with 1., please explain why.

b. The people who oppose retribution are also making moral claims and/or implications. In particular, they claim that their proposed system is better, and they also claim or imply that those who believe retribution is deserved or just are mistaken. Of course, they can only make those assessments using information that contains no moral statements, or else there is a chain that leads to that.


c. I already explained that your "naturalistic fallacy" or "ought from and is" objection fails, or else hits every moral assessment made by every human ever. Let us see why:

Suppose A says B behaved immorally when he did X.
1. If A uses her own moral sense to make the assessment, then her assessment falls within the scope of your 'naturalistic fallacy' or 'is-ought' problem, because it does not logically follow from the fact that A's moral sense gives the verdict 'B's doing X was immoral', that B's doing X was immoral.
2. If A uses the moral sense of other humans, then the same holds.
3. If A derives her judgment from some moral premises P1, ...Pn , and some other premises Q, then the question is: How does A derive P1,..Pn.


As there is no infinite regress in A's argumentation or thought (she is human), then at some point A is basing her moral assessments on something that is not a moral premise. That falls afaul of your 'naturalistic fallacy', and taints the rest of the conclusions as they are based on an unwarranted starting point.


If you have any counterarguments at all, please state them, and I will explain why they fail.

I hardly even know where to start with that. I would refer you back to previous times when I replied regarding those at length, both here and in previous threads, and explained why I think your arguments are flawed.

And if what I am saying hits all moralities, then in some ways, yes, that is exactly the point. Though as I said previously, it hits some harder than others, particularly the more dogmatic ones with strong claims to real, universal, independent moral facts that it is claimed are known by the person asserting them, such as yours.

I'm seeing quite a lot of your 'precision' as pedantry and sophistry that hides an underlying intransigence and presumption. And in an odd way, it reminds me in some ways at least of the ways academic and learned theologians go about their business. Endless 'precision', logic and convolution, even citing evidence, in order to arrive at conclusions already assumed. Which is why I think you should be careful about levelling such criticisms at others as if you were immune. There's none so blind as those who think only others can't see.

Thank you for articulating that last paragraph there. It's a problem I tend to have with a good number of "philosophers" and it's admittedly a problem I've had in the past largely an infection I picked up from, well, pedantic sophists before I realized it was just pedantic sophistry.

My original ethical derivations came from a pretty radical idea: that there is some principle in nature, some thing derived from the context of our existence in the universe, that caused the emergence of ethics in humans, that our theories and ethics are attempts to approximate in the same way that there, in fact, mere approximations.

I really do think that there is a game theoretic approach possible to ethical philosophy, to make it strategic.

Let's look at Tic Tac Toe. There are things that "are". "Marks are owned by players", "marks are placed in alternating sequence", "marks are placed on a three by three grid", "marks once placed are set". There is a GOAL, "place three marks in a line", and a secondary goal "prevent three marks that are not your own from being placed in a line." From these 'is' things, one can derive an OUGHT wherein every single action made by the player is predetermined. It creates a strategy, and the players who use that strategy will invariably meet the inferior goal and if their opponent makes any mistake at all, they will get their superior goal. This creates an ought: IF your goal is to win (and not lose), you OUGHT apply that strategy as perfectly as possible.

Of course, I expect such an axiom to be controversial. I expect people to not want it, to reject it. I used the transform to a simple game to illustrate the point in a simple rather than hellishly complicated context such as ethics, though it was originally thinking about Tic Tac Toe that I actually came to understand the mechanism by which goals derive oughts from "is".

Other games have different rules. Sometimes those rules imply that there can be no strategy: that there is no way to achieve any particular goal and the results of the game are random (like the card game WAR).

So to me this says that some of the fundamental elements of moral philosophy have to be approached from the examination of goals... hence my metagoal. Because it can't just be about what I want, if I want general strategy.

 

[Rhea]

b. The people who oppose retribution are also making moral claims and/or implications. In particular, they claim that their proposed system is better, and they also claim or imply that those who believe retribution is deserved or just are mistaken. Of course, they can only make those assessments using information that contains no moral statements, or else there is a chain that leads to that.

My stance on retribution is not a moral one, it rests entirely and solely on effectiveness.

Human brains see injustice, they amplify it, they have biased perceptions about it. It will often have unintended consequences (always?)
Retribution inspires - nearly always - conclusions about righteousness and retaliation.
Rehabilitation does not. You try to fix what you can fix.
When you cannot fix it, you protect against it by incarceration.
If you punish in incarceration, people see that and react to it.
If you merely isolate without punishment, it diminishes that causes of further retaliation, further retribution, further vigilane punishment.


Your moral/ethical hairsplitting are not relevant to the ideas that drive my stance on this issue.