Chris

Thanks for pointing that out. I did indeed mean that there is no objective moral reality. I can see how that could be misleading.

TimmmaaHH!

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I did indeed mean that there is no objective moral reality.

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I don't think this necessarilly follows from the things you've said. Or, if it is true, that means you lose any basis for judging what someone ought to do and you're again left with the unsatisfying business of self-interest and in a position of undecidability imposed by relativism. I'm not suggesting that there is any sort of externally imposed Good (i.e. god) - and I'm not sure I see how serving the larger organism is any different than serving god (in fact, I think it's precisely that close similarity - the serving a higher purpose - which can make the superorganism notion so appealing). I am suggesting, though, that in order for there to be a meaningful morality there needs must be an objective principle by which acts are judged, i.e. we must define Good and make sure it is in all cases in accord with reality.

For me, that principle resides in the celebration of the individual if you will, rather than subordinating that individual to a larger whole... I like to say "everything is local" and that would include morality. It is not found in the existence or purpose of something 'larger than ourselves' (which is rendered meaningless as, in my reading, you point out with your questioning of god's worth and denial of a grand scheme). Rather, Good is found moment to moment in our state of being; or more accurately perhaps, Good emerges discretely from interelational states.

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Meaning and value cannot exist beyond the framework of man's mind.

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I would disagree. Things exist in relation to one another whether or not they are conscious. That relation is meaning. A. Greimas worked this out into a formal system of semantics by which you can define anything by its state of relation to its associated (i.e. semantically adjacent) concepts. The basic form looks like this:



The really nifty thing about that, I think, is that meaning is formed in terms of intensions (sic) and is idependent of arbitrary symbols and, esp., is free of any particular manifestation of that meaning: truth beyond fact, i.e. the meaning would be true in all possible worlds - and that gives you objective meaning that is also internally generated.

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the theory of evolution is a "theory" for one reason

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flat wrong. Building theories is what science does. We especially like the true ones

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it has never been proven experimentally

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flat wrong. Reference: Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch : A Story of Evolution in Our Time

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The funny thing is that even the theory of evolution is not well understood.

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flat wrong.

Edited by: Jeremy1952 at: 12/18/02 10:24:24 pm

Ani:

I agree with you when you say that things exist in relation to one another, and that relation is meaning. However, I'm not sure I follow your logic when you conclude that meaning in this sense is synonymous with meaning in the moral sense. Can moral values exist in relation to other moral values independent of consciousness and can they be universally objective for that matter? I guess I just don't see how the descriptive relationships between moral concepts can tell us anything about what is good anymore than black is not white can.

Your comments on meaning in terms of intention lead me to believe that I have misunderstood your argument. Certainly you cannot be saying that intention can exist as a meaningful objective moral standard?

- Tim

Edited by: Timothy Schoonover at: 12/18/02 10:24:09 pm

hmmm... meaning is not really the same thing as a definition like you'd find in a dictionary (which can only be true for this particular world), which is why I use the term intension (not to be confused with intention). I like to think of it as the meaning created by the "tension" in the relational state. More formally, an intension is the "sense" (or more formally still, the function) which maps the referents (i.e. instantiations) in a particular world. In our world, for example, the term water refers to H20, while in, say, an anti-matter world it might refer to a molecule made up of different anti-elements peculiar to that world, yet still have the same sense, would still be "water" in that it would be in the same relation to its world as H20 is in ours.

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Can moral values exist in relation to other moral values independent of consciousness and can they be universally objective for that matter?

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I believe they can, though I think you need to be very, very careful in how it's understood. Or, if I can restate what you've said... moral values and/or concepts are a product of consciousness; but I feel we can get at more fundamental level (which is why I used the term Good instead of moral) - so it's not the relation between different moral values that is an issue, but rather it is the relational state which generates the potential for moral action. If we have a meaning for the term Good which is true in all possible worlds (universally true in the deepest sense), then we have a moral imperative from which the values can be derived, a principle of Good relation upon which moral action is based. The Good relation part is what is independent of consciousness, though it only gains moral weight with awareness of it.