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From: flink@umcp-cs.UUCP (Paul V Torek)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: Re: What is morality anyways?
Message-ID: <1413@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 18:18:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1413
Posted: Tue Aug 27 18:18:35 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Aug-85 22:18:58 EDT
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Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
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In article <27500102@ISM780B.UUCP> jim@ISM780B.UUCP writes:
>[balter]
>My dictionary says, as you [warack] seem to, that "desire" is "craving", 
>but that doesn't seem to me to encompass the notion of "desirable 
>behavior" in a moral sense.  We will probably have to keep repeating 
>what we mean in order to be sure that we not disagreeing only in word 
>but not in intent.  My use of "desire" above was intended as "complex, 
>filtered, rationally evaluated preference", as opposed to "craving" or 
>"simple desire" or "animal desire" or immediate desire".

I think your definition of desire, while not unusual, is so loose as to 
make it a useless concept.  I.e., all the air has gone out of your 
statement about morality and desire once you define desire so loosely.

>[balter]
>>[...]  If they claimed that the earth was flat, then we can argue
>>that they are flatly (heh heh) wrong on the basis of empirical evidence.
>>No such basis is available when arguing moral issues.

How about individual benefit?  Empirical evidence is available on that,
and it's obviously relevant to interpersonal morality.  For (admittedly
rather trivial) example, if someone is doing something that harms himself
and others, and helps nobody, we can argue that he should stop, and we
have an empirical basis to appeal to.  (And unfortunately, people do
that sort of thing more often than you might think!)
 
>[balter]
>I think the notion that good and bad are "out there" rather than "in here"
>comes from a fundamental rejection by the organism that it is in fact an
>organism, rather than some sort of pure rational entity tapped into some
>sort of idealized "real" world (for more on this concept of the real mind as
>only an approximation of the idealized mind, see Dennett's "Elbow Room";
>the book is quite literally "thought provoking").

Funny, I would say just the opposite:  forgetting you're an organism is
the source of the idea that good and bad are "in here", where "here" is
the mind.  Our bodies make good and bad "out there" in the sense that
they are recalcitrant like the rest of reality; one can't "decide" a la
Sartre, R.M. Hare, etc. what they are.  (J. Habermas aptly calls the 
views of people like Hare and Sartre "decisionistic".  He rejects
their position -- he must be brilliant, he agrees with me! :-> ).)

--Paul V Torek, umcp-cs!flink