United-Philosophy

Forgive me if im mistaken but are you trying to summon the winged dragon of ra to the battlefield?

• I actually disagree partially with this point, I don’t think this philosophy is useless rather we don’t know how to use it yet, but I don’t think we should give up on trying there may be an answer we’ve yet to come up with that will solve this or it may be by its very nature unprovable but even if that’s the case it can still teach us a lot about how we come to believe things and where we fall short. Its better to be aware of where our understanding is flawed so we can work around it than it is to pretend like no flaws exist. My approach is not to dismiss epistemic nihilism outright but to acknowledge that epistemic nihilism also applies to itself. If nothing can be known then we can’t know if we can’t know anything so we should still try to find a way that is most likely to attain knowledge IF such knowledge is possible. I acknowledge nothing is certain and attempt to narrow down what possibilities are more likely than others using various different epistemic perspectives. For example I start with a mild bit of pragmatism using a sort of variation of pascal’s wager to determine it is better to pursue knowledge in all circumstances than it is to give up on it, from there I find that Foundationalism and Coherentism are useful approaches and I don’t think either one is fully enough to stand on its own so I tend to use both, when one fails I reinforce it with the other. I also use pragmatism to bridge the gap from epistemic nihilism into positivism and constructivism and all this combined is in my opinion one of the most well rounded epistemologies. It recognizes the merits of each epistemic approach and uses them without falling into most of their pitfalls. I find people often get confused by how this works and like to poke and prod at it a bit but I have yet to find a question that cannot be reasonably answered by one of these epistemologies and I am always open to discussion on this just in case anyone has any objections I might not be aware of.

• I agree especially when using the terminology of “almost certainly” there’s probably no way to be certain of anything but the concept of a monotheistic god specifically is too logically inconsistent and so does not seem likely to be true.

• I don’t think moral realism is logically consistent either when morality fundamentally relies on subjective perceivers to exist. For example if the universe had absolutely no life in it and never would produce it, would murder still be wrong? What about theft? These moral concepts of murder and theft wouldn’t even make sense in this context because we understand these terms to be things that sentient creatures do to other sentient creatures and we interpret these things as harmful based on how they make us feel, that’s entirely the Basis of subjectivity. If morality were objective it would exist as a truth independent of any sentient observer but it instead cannot exist in any context without this.

Now an argument could be made that while the experience of harm is subjective the path to avoiding it might be objective, essentially an objective truth about subjective states of being. And in this regard I am uncertain, It seems that the preference of people between what they deem as harmful, pleasurable, or acceptable, varies wildly from person to person and so it seems unlikely that a full consensus can be reached on what is good or bad. It would seem the only objective claim about morality would be to claim it is subjective but subjectively we want to believe morality  is objective.

• I mean it depends on who is using it, common sense isn’t all that common. 

We can break this up into a few different  variations on the golden rule which is supposed to be one of the most intuitive moral beliefs there is and you’ll see how many people might differ from each other in what they think is common sense.

The platinum rule: Treat others as they want to be treated

The golden rule: Treat others as you want to be treated 

The silver rule: Treat others as they treat you

The bronze rule: Treat others as you are told 

The tarnished rule: Treat others as you want to treat them 

Even though each of these perspectives we can intuitively understand we each have a preference for a particular rule over the others and none of them are perfect in every situation by any means.  We can understand the moral actions of someone using the silver rule even if we disagree with their approach and they might think the golden or platinum rule just allows people to take advantage of you. A person with a preference to the golden rule would see the platinum rule as requiring too much information in most situations and a platinum preference person would see the golden rule as too presumptuous as to what other people would prefer. There’s a lot of nuance in morality and just going by common sense is not the best we can come up with, but it’s effective enough that society doesn’t collapse

• I agree only in part though, I think utilitarianism itself is a good  starting point from there you can move into preference utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, but deontology is an equally valid moral theory and so I think utilitarianism actually works best within a deontological framework by  Assessing the impact an action would have on the various rights everyone has. And once we figure out how to navigate conflicts between rights using these utilitarian methods we can begin to establish specific virtues that serve as shortcuts to the most moral behaviors leading to fewer conflicts of rights.

There’s actually seemingly a whole triangular cycle of moral analysis that occurs between the three major branches of ethics in this way. Virtue ethics, Deontology, and Utilitarianism. Deontology needs a baseline to determine what a person’s rights should be and so ascribes a value to certain virtues that everyone should have. Utilitarianism assesses the impact actions have but requires an understanding of why some things are harmful and others are beneficial, so deontological rights are useful in gauging this conflict and why things are harmful or beneficial, in turn once all this is sorted out we can, as stated before, begin to establish virtues that seek to balance as many different moral situations as possible bringing us full circle.

This is another reason I don’t think morality is objective because our three best theories on it are ultimately circular and need one another to fully function properly.

• I agree with the first half but disagree with the second. It is indeed better to fix what is already wrong than to introduce something else that is not broken, but Creating more problems to solve is not better than making existing problems worse.

• why not both?

• within reason. The way I see it there’s a spectrum and if you fall too far to either end then you’re doing something wrong. On this spectrum there are four categories 

-Self-centered

-Selfish

-Slefless

-Self-sacrificial

Of these four categories the two in the middle and any space in between is morally acceptable. It is good to be selfish and take care of your needs so long as you try not to do so at the expense of others, and it is good to be selfless as long as you don’t neglect your own needs. But to be self-centered is bad because you neglect others to only serve yourself and being self sacrificial is bad because you neglect yourself to only serve others. 

The middle ground is the best approach here.

• this I agree with in full

I agree with you that polytheism is more logically consistent than monotheism however it still isn’t perfect, it intuitively seems to be less of a singular source of explanation for the nature of the universe and where we all come from and what meaning we have if everything is split into different parts. You’d still have people asking what created the gods even greek mythology has this issue where Zeus Hades and Poseidon were originally the children of higher beings like Kronos. Additionally you still have the problem of good which is a separate issue from the problem of evil. The problem of good asks if something is good because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it is good?

But there is still another way. Id argue pantheism is even easier to defend because no one can really ever claim it isn’t the case with certainty it intuitively makes some sense and it makes you part of that being even if you don’t realize it so the problem of evil and good is no longer relevant because any harm you experience is only god interacting with themselves. For example  If I choose to eat something spicy it may hurt my tongue but I still enjoy the taste as a whole,  is it morally wrong for me to subject my tastebuds to the stinging bite of    capsaicin? What about drinking a bitter medicine? Probably not most people would see that merely as a matter of preference, in a pantheistic world view any evil or suffering can be explained as a preference of how that being prefers to exist or even a necessity for how that being needs to be its best self. Evil and good would only be a matter of perspective and all perspectives are contained in one singular entity. 

Omnipotence is also easier to establish because if god is everything then god can do anything within themselves. same with omniscience if god knows everything about themselves then they can know anything.

The paradoxes only arise when we expand omnipotence and omniscience beyond what is contained by the pantheistic god. A pantheistic god doesn’t need to create and so it couldn’t create a stone so heavy it cannot lift, and a pantheistic god still likely cannot answer the question of philosophical nihilism but neither ca monotheistic or polytheistic god and to ask these questions is to step outside the established boundaries of the concept and thus are likely to be dismissed as irrelevant. 

Now often in practice pantheism also has certain other religious beliefs attached to it such as karma and reincarnation both of which can be argued against and refuted but karma and reincarnation are not fundamentally necessary to the nature of a pantheistic entity. As a matter of fact I believe Hegel touched on a purer form of pantheism when talking about history as a process of integration. Hegelian pantheism is interesting and doesn’t have the burden of karma or reincarnation attached to it. 

This being said it ultimately becomes something that wether its true or not doesn’t really matter because it won’t change how we live our lives if anything it comes down again to a matter of preference. Do you find comfort believing that everything is part of a larger whole or are you content living from the perspective of a single person. I consider myself generally to be an atheist but I do still sometimes indulge in such thought experiments as this while admiring the vastness of our universe