= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
DanArmak comments on Rationality Quotes April 2014 - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (656)
I think they're both quite silly. Also, the fact that many people believe in God as a source of morality, is itself a reason why history (i.e. the actions of those people) is a bad moral guide.
Surely most pre-modern philosophers also had absolute moral systems?
Beforehand there was the idea that God's simply beyond human comprehension. One day he tells the Israelis to love their neighbors and the next he orders the Israelis to commit genocide.
You were supposed to follow a bunch of principles because those came from authoritative sources and not because you could derive them yourself.
If you read Machiavelli, he's using God as a word at times when we might simply use luck today. Machiavelli very much criticizes that approach of simply thinking that God works in mysterious ways.
Greeks and Romans had many different Gods and not one single source of morality.
Of course absolute morality is not all the modernism is about.
I was thinking about classic and medieval Christian philosophy, which tied morality to an unchanging (and so absolute) God.
As an aside, when the Israelis were ordered to love their neighbors, the reference was to the neighboring Israelis and peaceful co-inhabitants of other tribes. Jews were never told by God to love everyone or not to have enemies; that is a later, Christian or Christian-era idea.
But still a mysterious God who's so complicated that humans can't fully understand him so the should simply follow what the priest who has a more direct contact to God says. Furthermore you should follow the authority of your local king because of the divine right of kings that your local king inherited.
The idea that you can use reason to find out what God wants and then do that is a more modern idea.
Things switched from saying that if the telescope doesn't show that planets move the way the ancestors said they are supposed to move, then the telescope is wrong to the idea that maybe the ancestors are wrong about the way the planets move. The dark ages ended and you have modernity.
I don't have much to say about the actual point you're making, but you've been setting off alarm bells with stuff like this:
What's your background on the history of this period? And on the philosophy of Marx and Hegel? The things you are saying seem to me to be false, and I want to check if the problem isn't on my end.
What do you mean with this period?
I don't think that modernity started with Hegel but with people like Machiavelli with is around ~1500. Hegel and Marx on the other hand did their work in the 19th century. I did read Machiavelli's The Prince cover to cover.
In the case of Marx and Hegel I'm a German and in this case speaking about German philosophers. That means I have been educated in school with a German notion of what history happens to be. I don't see political history in the Anglosaxon frame of Whig vs Tory.
I did spent a bunch of time in the JUSOS with is the youth organisation of the German SPD and the abbreviation roughly translates into Young Socialists in the SPD. I therefore did follow debates about whether socialism as end goal should be kicked out of the party program of the SPD or be left in.
Lastly I did a lot of reading in political philosophy both primary and secondary sources. Most of it a while ago.
But one sentence summaries of complex political thoughts are by their nature vague. Of course Hegel already had the notion of history and me saying replaced might give the impression that he didn't. But Hegel did have God and Marx did not.
Just out of curiosity, what was the result of those debates?
It's still in there but more for symbolic reasons. Party leadership didn't really want it but the party base did. The relevant phrase also happens to be democratic socialism. Meaning that the goal is economic equality but representative democracy and not a bunch of soviets and "consensus" decision making.
In practice the party policies under Schroeder were more "third way" and as a result they wanted to "update" the party program to reflect that policy change.
What do you mean by "economic equality"? Do you mean that everyone should have the same amount of money/resources? (This is not a stable state of affairs if people then proceed to engage in commerce).
If you have a government which constantly redistributes money you could hold it constant if you wanted to do so. But the people with whom I spoke usually don't go that far. Concerns are rather that everyone has access to a "living wage".
Defining how exactly the end state will look like isn't that much of a concern if you can decide whether or not you move in the right direction. There the feeling that third way policies of cutting government pensions don't go in that direction.
Yes, but that's not exactly compatible with anything resembling freedom.
The problem is what's considered a "living wage" changes with changes in society.
It is a concern if you want to evaluate whether you should even be trying to move in that direction.
Is this line of conversation still "just curiosity" about the results of SPD debates, or are you trying to bait an argument?
What is a living wage changes with changes in society, and that isn't obviously a problem. If society becomes richer, people expect higher wages, and if society becomes richer, it can afford them. Depending on the quantities.
Amazingly enough, freedom supporting policies can negatively impact equality. To put it another way, if there were no conflicts between values, there would be no politics. To put it a third way, you keep writingas though you are the Tablet, and have the One True Set of Values inscribed in your brain.
Thanks, that's helpful.
For Hegel and Marx history is the process of change.
Both the amounts of Gods per person and the percentage of people who believe went down over time. Thus history favors atheism.
I don't see why the 'amount of Gods per person' is a valid metric for anything. Progression from poly- to monotheism doesn't imply a future progression to atheism.
The actual percent of atheists in society has indeed increased over time, but it's never been significantly above 10% worldwide and it's not clear that's it's rising right now (Wikipedia source). It's hardly strong enough evidence to conclude that a majority of humanity will be atheistic one day. Other religions surely exhibit or previously exhibited rising trends at least as strong.