Why has consent become the ruling principle of ethics? When denial of objective morality brings about its subversion of norms, but at the same time it's clear that some norms are still inevitable, then some human-centred principle would straightforwardly follow, I think, be it majority rule or the principle of consent.

Is it not evident in the American revolution? "No taxation without representation" would exemplify the principle of consent and democracy exemplifies majority rule. Of course, neither of these can be applied consistently, so they get applied selectively. In US history, slaves, natives, and non-citizens were excluded from having representation and, by virtue of having no representation, they were exempt from both duties and rights alike, and authorities could kick them around without any consequence, because there was no ethical or legal principle to make authorities accountable. Traces of it continue even now.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

The definition of rape, as noted, is also often very broad in these surveys, such as including the woman having any alcohol or any pressure, like the slightest kind of persuasive, can be included, even if the woman herself doesn't consider the incident rape.

When faced with a particular study, "often" should not be an argument. The definitions in the specific study are important.

When the study makes a distinction between rape and sexual assault, and a further distinction with harassment, it just might be a good study, depending on how consistently the definitions are followed through and whether the conclusions are warranted by the data.

Mind you, I have seen conclusions unwarranted by the data in plenty of statistical studies of more legit fields, such as economics (insofar as it can be called data there), so I'd say statistical competence is a wider problem in scholarship. At any rate, one should always check these three things in any study:

- definitions
- data
- conclusions

When these three speak the same thing, you should not say it's bad scholarship even when you don't like the conclusions. When you don't like the conclusions or the field itself, it might be a true clash of ideologies (or of personal interests).

But when it's bad scholarship, we should reject the conclusions because it's bad scholarship, not (only) because there's ideological bent. It might very well be ideological bent in our own direction, but bad scholarship deserves to be called out even then.

As much as I hope for the decline of nominalism, it seems that nominalism is an automatic background system for mathematicians.

Physicists who avoid straightforward atomism (belief in the primacy of particulars over universals) tend to approach nominalism too.

Sciences that would motivate essentialism or idealism with spiritual focus are not hip these days. Biology will remain in the grip of Darwinism for the foreseeable future. Arts and letters have not yet properly recovered from having discredited themselves with postmodernism.

Theology is simply history + ancient languages. There is some residual mention of God, but it's not much better than mentions of God in physics, where God = grasp of the theory of everything, or in law, where God = force majeure.

The best option currently seems to be philosophy proper, particularly ontology, ethics, logic, and epistemology (roughly in that order). These provide a direct insight into what are the most important things to think about, how and why.

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

I'm confused about what you mean by Marx being constructive. Marx was notoriously vague about how his utopia would work or be realised. He spoke of a man doing a number of jobs or hobbies in a day, but filled in no details about how this society could be operate.

He was constructive in the sense that he was a good scholar; nobody can deny this. His economic theory about capitalism is the best one out there. The one about socialism is, yes, a utopia, but the mistake is to see in him just the utopia and forget his contribution to the analysis of capitalism. His critique was stronger in every way than his utopia, and the critique was constructive in the sense that the social democratic parties of Europe took it and in fact improved capitalism to last another century.

(The most important economic insight by Marx was to show that capitalism itself generates cyclical crises. His suggested solution was to get rid of capitalism and replace it with socialism. Social democrats modified this: Instead of revolution, let's see how to survive the crises. Whereas mainstream economists see economy, wrongly, as an equilibrium and every crisis is a shock and surprise to them.)

But ever since postmodernism, the so-called Marxist scholars do not have a utopia. They only use shoddy scholarship to produce fruitless destructive criticism or hyped babble. There is no value or insight in calling them Marxists, particularly when they themselves see no connection either.

Neither is supported. New forum software must!

@Johannes
A way to do a text-based table would be with pre tags, but since we don't have it, just put it in plain text without tags.

Edit: Ah, but for that let's see if plain text works as desired. Text-based table using the tab key:

random        words
continue        to
several        lines

Result: Works when you do it in an external editor, but gets somewhat mangled upon pasting here.

Conclusion: Good support of the pre tag is highly desirable.