Allison Mack's blog is filled with all kinds of interesting philosophical discussions that I thought would be interesting to bring over here to talk about. I took philosophy in college but haven't really felt intrigued about it since then, as much as I am nowadays.

Allison proposes that there is such a thing as a "human construct" and attempts to provide an explanation of: "The understanding that we build of ourselves, the world, and the way the two work and relate." She uses an example of a baby and how she/he may experience the world initially and how the baby develops a sense of self, and that sense of self being the human construct.

I've heard of a "world" construct, but not really much of a human construct. What do you guys think?

As many of you may frequent the philosophical gourmet report like I do, I came across this link that describes the analytic/continental distinction:

Philosophy is Dead
"This is why there is a powerful need for philosophers equipped with analytic methodology to work within…the Continental tradition—to sort the gold from the humbug."

Is the armchair, a priori-soluble philosophy dead according to Quine and Wittgenstein and the rest of the analytics? I know many people, like Popper, hated the idea that philosophy would be dead since it has been accused of stepping past its bounds and into the jurisdiction of the harder sciences, like genetics, physics, etc.

One of my emeritus professors is big on metaphysics, but he has time and again been self-proclaimed as a philosophical dinosaur that "can no longer keep up with the analytics."

a) What are your thoughts on armchair philosophy and its utility/lack of it?

a.1) With all this in mind, should we study merely as mental exercise or professionally like the Sophists, or should we climb up the ladder and discard it for good? Darn it, and I really argued that philosophy was a language-game...

The exchange we had on Stakeholder/Shareholder debate was heated and interesting to say the least. It also inspired me to take yet another look at current scholarship on Marxism to flesh out an actual position on the possibility of global communism. The two books that stand out as being the most popular current discussions in this issue are Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude, and the book I am currently reading, Kojin Karatani's Trans-Critique: On Kant and Marx. H&N tend to focus primarily on actually existing communism and, what they see, as the actual possibility of a counter-hegemonic agent that can destroy global capitalism before it destroys the globe. They see this possibility in, to utilize one of their many examples, the Zapatistas, and draw loosely from everything ranging from Spinoza's Political Notebooks, to anything penned by Marx, to anything penned by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to make the point that there is a "multitude" burgeoning forth that can quite possibly destroy global capitalism and restore the possibility of global direct democracy. Now, interesting as that is, I have been through that book. Since this is a community geared toward fostering "close-readings" in philosophy, it might be fruitful and fun to take a close look at a few chapters from Kojin Karatani's book Trans-Critique if people are so inclined.
I was thinking it might be interesting to focus entirely on the second half of the book which is devoted entirely to Marx. It's not incredibly dense reading, and I'm not sure if it requires an altogether fluency in Marxist jargon, but the section is approx. 175 pgs long comprised of four different sections. So I'd estimate that we can tackle it in 2-3 weeks, give or take a bit. Let me know if this is interesting to anyone and I'll start posting ASAP.

While I have no idea whether or not Shakespeare had ever read Anselm, or if he knew anything of the ontological argument, it seems that Hamlet could have had something to say to Anselm. I care not to discuss in depth the ontological argument, but rather that simple premise, that to exist is greater than not to exist.

To be sure, I don't bring this up lightly or in jest, I'm actually quite serious. It seems a question that Camus might have wrestled with, as well. In the pure light of truth, of reason, what argument can be made that to exist is greater than not to exist?

There is a heated debate in business ethics. As aspiring philosophy dittoheads I presume you have come across this view, but here is a quick primer for the uninitiated. What is the socially responsible course of action for a corporation? The shareholder view, propagated by Milton Friedman and his many disciples, states that the only morally acceptable act for a corporation is to maximize profits because their over-riding duty is to create benefits for the shareholders, those who own stock in that corporation. In theory, this sounds simple enough, make money. In practice it has led to corporations doing undesirable things like slashing workers benefits, to dumping chemicals in rivers because contamination is less costly than properly disposing of hazardous chemicals. Seeing the obvious flaws in this argument, other Ethicists have proposed the "stakeholder" view that says the corporation has a duty to take care of everyone who has a stake in the company. This means, giving living wages to labor along with benefits, and taking care of the "commons" so that the environment doesn't go to shit in the manufacturing process. Shareholders are against using sweatshop labor to create cheap products even if this means it makes a greater profit for the stockholders.

It seems to me, progressive that I am, that Milton Friedman should burn in hell. The stockholder view is greed at its worst. Yet Milton Friedman is revered as a God in many departments teaching economics and has even had serious crossover success in Business Ethics... what gives? Is there something to this argument that I'm not getting? Keep in mind I've read Friedman as well as many books on how his views have actually played out, and find it really hard to imagine that any rational person with an ounce of empathy or care toward building a progressive ecological philosophy would ever peruse the "shareholder" view. I'm puzzled because this post was inspired by a family member who expressed absolute disgust with me when I said that a casino should give a portion of their profits to fund Gambler's Anonymous programs in their community.
Isn't the purpose of ethics to figure out what is the most rational course of action for a group? Isn't it obvious that stakeholder view fits this criteria?

It is well understood that duty cannot defer to passion. Actions that defer to passions, can at best proceed in accordance with duty. Such deference preempts the possibility of acting from duty. It is equally certain that duty cannot defer to orientation, construed as a certain regularity in passions. Nor can it defer to outlook, construed as a cohesive diachronic account of passions. For regularity and cohesion add nothing principled to the mix. But by the same token, it is far from clear that duty is independent of character, construed as a cohesive diachronic organizing principle of passions and constituent motive of actions.

Assuming these definitions, is there a coherent notion of acting from duty that makes it coextensive with acting from character?

Crossposted to larvatus and real_philosophy.

Moral Psychology is the study of the human mind as it relates to morality and moral conduct. A moral psychologist typically provides us with an analysis of such concepts as agency, action, character, selfhood and freedom, amongst others.

David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche are both moral psychologists in this sense. My aim here is twofold: to describe their basic answers to moral-psychological questions, and to explore the extent to which Nietzsche can be said to be distinct from Hume. This is a troubling question for anyone interested in Nietzsche as an original thinker, for both surface and depth readings reveal that his moral psychology has a strikingly Humean character. It is also a potentially troubling issue for "neo-Humeans", who constitute the numerical majority in analytic ethical philosophy. For if Nietzsche is close to Hume, then Hume is also close to Nietzsche, and Humeans may not be able to avoid confronting distinctly Nietzschean doubts about morality and social conduct.


1. Metaphilosophical Motivation

Both Hume and Nietzsche¹ advocate a kind of naturalism. This is a weak naturalism, for it does not seek to give science authority over philosophical inquiry, nor does it commit itself to a specific ontological or metaphysical picture. Rather, it seeks to (a) place the human mind firmly in the realm of nature, as subject to the same mechanisms that drive all other natural events, and (b) investigate the world in a way that is roughly congruent with our best current conception(s) of nature:

Human minds are not strangers in nature, but inextricably parts of it. (Hume, T 1.2.1)

To translate man back into nature, to become master over the many vain and overly enthusiastic interpretations that have been scrawled over homo natural to see to it that man stands today... deaf to the siren-songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have been piping at him all too long: "you are more, you are higher, you are of a different origin!" (Nietzsche, BGE 230)

Furthermore, the motivation for this general position is common to both thinkers. Hume and Nietzsche saw old rationalist/dualist philosophies as both absurd and harmful: such systems were committed to extravagant and contradictory metaphysical claims which hinder philosophical progress. Furthermore, they alienated humanity from its position in nature—an effect Hume referred to as "anxiety"—and underpinned religious or "monkish" practises which greatly accentuated this alienation. Both Nietzsche and Hume believe quite strongly that coming to see ourselves as we really are will banish these bugbears from human life.

To this end, both thinkers ask us to engage in honest, realistic psychology. "Psychology is once more the path to the fundamental problems," writes Nietzsche (BGE 23), and Hume agrees:

the only expedient, from which we can hope for success in our philosophical researches, is to leave the tedious lingering method, which we have hitherto followed, and instead of taking now and then a castle or village on the frontier, to march up directly to the capital or center of these sciences, to human nature itself." (T Intro)

( 2. Selfhood )
( 3. Action and the Will )
( 4. Freedom and Action )
( 5. Consequences: Freedom, Human Nature and Morality )
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¹ Nearly any substantial reading of Nietzsche is controversial, and I am aware that the 'naturalist' reading is opposed by such diverse thinkers as Richard Rorty, Alex Nehemas and Gilles Deleuze. However, there is more than enough textual support in Nietzsche for both pro- and anti-naturalist readings, so my account may be usefully viewed as a Nietzschean moral psychology rather than an excavation of what Nietzsche himself thought. In my opinion, such an excavation is not possible with the texts we now possess.
² Alasdair MacIntyre calls the offering of such an explanation "the activity of unmasking... that most characteristically modern of activities." (After Virtue 71-72) MacIntyre's work stands as an unmatched critique of Hume's role in the creation of our modern "emotivist" culture, with its associated fact/value dichotomy. This is the culture which has ceased to believe that its evaluations refer to anything other than the contingent drives of its members: in Nietzsche's terms, a culture which has killed God.
³ The German term here is frei Geist. This is important because the term "spirit" has religious overtones in our language. But geist is not translatable into a single term, it also strongly connotes mind and, crucially, motivation.

I have always felt that I stood alone in ambiguity on one major topic that cannot help but come up in nearly every moral, ethical, and political debate. I find that this topic divides not just the educated and non-educated, the religious and nonreligious, but everyone in every different background. it is strange its power to divide even those who are in the same belief system or spirituality to opposite sides of spectrum. I refer to the debate over abortion and the dubbed "right to choose" or "right to life" discussion.

no matter who I ask or where I go to ask it the answer always comes out with the same intensity. Its as if I asked them if they agreed with the general message of Mein Kampf, a question which would actually carry the audacity to outrage the listener and warrant an extreme reaction. apparently abortionists are worse than himmler according to some and the pro-life crowd is the equivalent of hitler to others. personally, i never understand the divide on the issue. at least when sensible human being discuss general morality they sit down like civilized individuals and typically end up agreeing or agreeing to disagree. but no such understanding exists between the pro-choice and pro-life crowd. "you are either with us or against." if i personally were to play devil's advocate against one side the other side would consider me lucifer himself.

like thompson once said (while referring to himself), "no sympathy for the devil." (quote taken blatantly out of context)

so here is what i would like anyone reading to consider: it has become apparent to me that this entire abortion debate is merely over definitions. the pro-life crowd defines a fetus as life, the same as mine or yours, while the pro-choice crowd does not equate the fetus as equal to the lives of you and i (or at least overlooks the quality of life as less then the necessity of choice). the pro-life crowd does not consider the "right to choose" a human right while the pro-choice crowd feels the right to choice when you have a child is essential in modern society. but further more that the debate based on definition cannot have a entirely morally justifiable answer. simply said, who is to say whether there is morality behind keeping a baby or terminating a pregnancy after 4 weeks? or is it simply the same debate that everyone has accepted: the kind of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong bullshit that most want to accept?

a couple of posts ago a member of this community attempted to prove or at least openly embrace the correctness of utilitarianism. it is my opinion that not every choice in life is so public and that utilitarianism may be thoroughly justifiable but horribly unrealistic. (i guess i am saying it is a little distopian in its ends then i would like to accept). but i bring up utilitarianism to suggest whether abortion can be simplified to such terms. is it possible that the abortion question can be answered by a silent or private morality? or do we have to accept that when we decide to abort a pregnancy or not we are making an impact on the world around us at a greatly level? is it okay to terminate a pregnancy because of the discomfort, displeasure, and often sorrow of many even though it might violate the right to live of one? can we always fall back on the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people or most we be more creative than utilitarianism?

there are a lot of questions that as i am writing this i would doubt many consider consistently. as i said before i think most people violently spit out "PRO-CHOICE!" or "PRO-LIFE!" without thinking about the question of definitions, of utilitarianism, or even of logic itself. if you are curious of my personal opinion i will only admit that i am an amoralist and don't care about definitions or the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. i only consider the goal and logical outcomes at hand and i simply move on. i would never criticize a decision to keep or give up a child on that principle alone. either way i am bringing this argument out of the hopes that some one has logical bias and pause for their own philosophy or possibly insight considering the philosophy of another. i would be very thankful for such a comment.

For those of you with silly opinions on pornography, I highly recommend the latest issue of the Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy, with A. W. Eaton's paper "A Sensible Anti-Porn Feminism" (Ethics 117, July 2007: 674-715) and comments from Patrick D. Hopkins, Rae Langton, Ishani Maitra, and Laurie Shrage.