Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

It seems disrespectful and trollish because I am deliberately giving an uncharitable reading to scholastic natural justice theorists. Normally it is good academic courtesy to give the opponent the most charitable reading of his theories, but I did not in this instance to raise the question of how exact is "moral disequilibrium" fundamentally different from "a disturbance in the Force," even though the later is obviously fatuous and not meriting serious consideration. Personally, I believe that scholastic theorists must have some less stupid reason that they're clinging to scholastic natural justice, and I would like to see a good apology. I originally wanted to have Dr. Feser produce the apology, but one of the blog readers referred me here.
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What do you mean by a good apology? Do you want a justification of the idea that justice involves proportionality and if so would care to raise an alternative definition of justice?

The problem with your trolling is that it doesn't even give a pejorative criticism (you didn't so much attack a strawman as not attack anything at all). So it's not a very effective way to pick a fight.

Tomislav Ostojich wrote:

But then you're in the awkward position of admitting that the hardass moralistic just society would result in a less livable society than my friendly liberal fruit-juice drinker society. And we don't have the freedom to choose the game when it comes to society. There are people who are free moral agents with competing interests and any choice of play you pick must acknowledge these fundamental facts.

1. What is this game of which you speak?

2. What moral system do these agents of which you speak follow?

Last edited by DanielCC (3/14/2016 9:21 pm)

DanielCC wrote:

On a tangent (I too find Trans-Humanism and the Neo-Eugenicists incredibly worrying, far more so than the social issues religious conservatives tend to obsess over) I think one might object by asking what it means to be human e.g. biologically we would not be human if we had a completely different digestive system or if our blood contained copper in place of iron, yet we would still be responsible moral agents. I recall Oderberg gets round this by arguing that any rational animal is metaphysically human (in which case he is using the term 'human' as I would 'person') even if they are not metaphysically homo sapiens.

I agree. A Klingon should still be treated with a certain dignity because a Klingon would have an immortal soul and is a rational being. That being said, old-school philosophy would deny a Klingon is likely to exist because man's bodily form is the perfect form for a rational animal (at least, in a sense, potentially).

DanielCC wrote:

With this in mind I don't think one an argue that body augmentation is itself immoral, rather it's the ideology behind it all which is monstrous.

Well, no. A bodily augmentation can be made to correct a natural defect (e.g. getting braces for your teeth as a child). To augment something presupposes that something's being and continuing to be; what bothers me with Transhumanism is the fact that they want to become either something like computers or angels.

 

DanielCC wrote:

To proclaim that the only good thing is to survive* and the only reason to survive is to find more effective reasons to survive - does not this sound hauntingly like the Nietzschean claim that the only end is power and power is nothing but more power?

Yes, it does; but the reason Nietzsche killed himself is because he didn't want to be human anymore. I think this is what the West is experiencing more and more: a radically anti-human ideal that (because it is impossible for us) cannot be realized and results in suicide (because the ideal was itself non-human). Hence in that ideology suicide makes sense because you were seeking to be other than human in the first place.

 

DanielCC wrote:

*Of course this has to be hedged about with a lot of black t-shirt speeches about how there is no ultimate meaning or objective morality. Not that this ever stopped a nihilist moralising in the very next sentence. 

LOL! To be sure, Daniel
 

"Timocrates" wrote:

Reparation justice can and does justify slavery of human beings. Because if a human being's life is interchangeable with a finite good, then any extra finite good overrides that one finite good. Someone could kill someone you love and replace it in principle and satisfy it in justice with goods. This is - as universal human intuition knows - impossible. It's just easier to see this in the case of people whom we love.

This is not what I mean by restorative justice. The only proper way to do justice for the wrong that was done when a life is killed is to bring the person back from the dead. This is impossible. So justice cannot be actualized in this life. This is philosophically speaking not a problem, because there is no philosophical obligation for us to have a definition of justice that can be actualized. More importantly, justice, under my definition, would have nothing whatsoever to do with the perpetrator of the crime. What to do with the criminal is purely a matter of preventing future injustice.

I suspect that retribution has become such a popular definition of justice not because of any rigorous reasoning showing that retribution is good, but because of displacement we become extremely angry when justice cannot be meted out and seek to displace our frustration upon the perpetrator. This explains how retribution can both be psychologically satisfying yet unsound.

Timocrates wrote:

Yes, it does; but the reason Nietzsche killed himself

Nietzsche didn't kill himself. He had a mental breakdown attributed to various causes, the earliest of which was syphilis, but which likely resulted from something else (see modern medical reassessment of his disorder: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17087793?dopt=Abstract)

Timocrates wrote:

is because he didn't want to be human anymore.

This is either a baldly wrong reading or a profound one. Nietzsche thinks that humanity is a creative process of transformation, so what Nietzsche teaches is a doctrine of something like artistic virtue that most befits this condition.

I also admit that the way you mimicked my final line and linked to "fetishized" made me laugh really hard. You clearly are a good analyst.