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Lurid:
I don't think you can criticise "objectivity" by suggesting "best available information and understanding" as an alternative.
I ain't. I'm saying that the attempt to gain knowledge of objective truth and base your actions on it - especially when it's objective ethical truth, be that consequential or absolute - is infintely regressive. When you've accepted that you won't know, you just pick a time t when you have to make a decision based on what you have. Since M$'s ostensible problem is that ze has already accepted that ze won't know the truth, the rest just follows on along...
M$:
I see your point that neither relativism nor solipsism make much difference to how we live...but they make a bit more of an impact on why we live surely? Or at least why we live the way we do and care about the things we care about?
It seems to me that you're looking for some kind of guide to living derived from ontology - or rather, it's reverse: from not knowing What Is. I don't think it's there. I believe that it's all and always about what you can do with the incomplete knowledge you have. Can you be absolutely certain that people you interact with are not parts of yourself? No. But you perceive yourself as distinct from them, and they appear to respond in that way. You can only continue in that way until and unless contrary evidence presents itself. You have no particular evidence to doubt your perception of the world, you just recognise that it is not certain.
And those things boil right down to the utterly selfish from those standpoints surely? All one 'need' be concerned with from a solipsistic or relativistic position is one's own comfort and convenience, surely?
Whether the world is objectively real or not has no bearing on its internal mechanisms. It will respond in the same way whether it's a genuine physical place or a myth projected into your mind as your living brain sits in a vat on my sitting room, admired by my friends as an artwork. So you can expect the same results from it; if you're selfish, people will yell at you, dump you, arrest you, or make you a CEO, depending on how you exhibit it.
Everyone else is just another self important closed system in a sea of self important closed systems, and it is impossible to do 'wrong' or 'right' by anybody but yourself, no??
Well, at that point you're leaving Solipsism, where you're the only person who really exists, and heading towards relativism-as-amoralism, I suppose. There's nothing that says your system of ethics has to be selfish, once you accept that others exist in some form. That you may seek to help others to gratify yourself may or may not be important... it's a long argument. Since there are other people, and we can communicate with them, we have the possibility of sharing views and intersubjective moral truths and cultural norms and so on. My earlier point stands - just because there's no Platonic Right & Wrong doesn't mean that I can't stand up and object to something on moral grounds - it just means I have to be prepared to accept that I'm asserting something as a good, and that decision rests with me, not with God or with something I can put my hand on to back me up.
Incidentally, I was never saying 'get off yer ass'. It was more like 'I've been there, it's a pretty empty place'. I think these are fine questions - even vital ones - but they should not paralyse your life. |
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