Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

An old man and old woman fall in love and marry. However, because of their age, they are unable to conceive children. Is their marriage somehow unnatural? Is their marriage somehow invalid?

why [d]o we need the human population to continue increasing? If anything, it's "unnatural" for a species as large as human[ity] to occur in such numbers as it is [?]

I don't know why you have such issues with people responding to your own red herrings. You charged my view of morality with not actually dealing with morality; I quipped that your supposed basis of morality is effectively fictional from my naturalist perspective.

My marriage isn't about procreation; it's about commitment. This includes commitment to future children, but why should I be judgmental of those who choose not to or who can't have children?

Quote from: ersi on 2016-06-30, 18:35:56

Okay. And how does this sandwich argument get you same-sex marriage? And I mean specifically same-sex marriage, not a sandwich, picking your nose, or Nazi propaganda.

It would save you from making claims like that gay marriage isn't natural.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-06-30, 18:35:56

Look at your own "argument" again: "Same-sex marriage significantly improves quality of life for some people without harming anyone." How is this an argument for same-sex marriage specifically, and not for e.g. Nazi propaganda?

It's not an argument for same-sex marriage specifically. That's the whole point. That notwithstanding, your Nazi propaganda example is even more ludicrous than your earlier pedophilia one. Unless, of course, you presuppose a counter-factual world where Nazi propaganda doesn't almost invariably lead to discrimination and violence. I don't know what's so hard about this to understand.

Eating a grossdeliciously greasy hamburger every day might increase well-being in the short term, but in ten years when you're obese you'll regret it. And even though I meant this as an example of conflicting desires (i.e., the desire to be healthy and the desire to eat hamburgers), it also works as an analogy for Nazi propaganda. After all, in the short term it is at least conceivable that it would increase overall well-being as you asserted. It's only once the propaganda starts to take effect that the severely negative consequences will begin being felt.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-06-30, 18:35:56

With personal satisfaction anyone can justify anything. An important aspect of moral theories is precisely to prevent people from going down the exclusively selfish path.

It might be able to justify more than you like, but it certainly wouldn't be able to justify everything. Just think of the famous ESS (evolutionary stable strategy) where both grudgers and cheaters can be evolutionarily stable even though a particular stable ESS may have virtually zero chance of occurring naturally. I can't immediately think of a moral equivalent, except in the sense that the example itself seems to have a moral component. Assuming cheaters have a desire to cheat, it may well be moral to cheat in a population of cheaters provided they also have a desire for being properly cheated. It might be immoral in this society to cheat in an unsophisticated manner, for example. I shoot myself in the foot by using something normally condemnable as an example, but when you get right down to it I'm sure we'd have an equally hard time leaving our preconceptions at the door when you talk about Sisyphus finding purpose in his boulder (like in Camus).

Quote from: ersi on 2016-06-30, 18:35:56

The point with rechtsstaat is not that there's no violence, but that there's retribution for unjust violence. Agree?

And that's one of the last-resort tools we have for molding desires, but the basic tools are praise and condemnation. This remains true no matter what you think metaphysically or meta-ethically.

Yes, you said that my morality was effectively fictional - without showing how. Which part of it is fictional? Which part of it has no basis in epistemology? Whereas your own naturalist perspective emphasising "desires" is neither naturalist (in naturalism, there are only physical things, and desires are not physical), epistemological or moral (you are not getting right and wrong from there and you have not shown reasons to promote this or that thing). Which makes all you have said about these things a giant red herring.

in naturalism, there are only physical things, and desires are not physical

And this gives us reason to support gay marriage how? Because there's "well-being" in it? Hedonism is the ideal? If yes, why have you not named it yet, so we can get on to counter-arguments to hedonism (for example, that it promotes lack of commitment, the exact opposite to what it takes to have marriage as per your claims)? If no, then you are not clarifying anything.

So, now you think it suffices you to say that gay marriage (and sandwich and picking your own nose and Nazi propaganda) is natural. Another undefined term. You are not improving things.

Which part of the word definition is so hard to understand? If you are not specifically making a case for gay marriage, then we have no case for gay marriage. Which means your alleged argument for gay marriage is not an argument for gay marriage, now by your own admission. You have been just emitting hot air and wasting digital space.

Nevermind, you have by now basically conceded that picking your own nose is marriage, just as long as you stay committed to it.

You mean the model Dawkins describes in Selfish Gene? What's moral in it when cheaters win? the funny thing is that it's not moral even when grudgers win. Whichever wins, neither gives us human sense of morality as we know it. So, the reason to take this seriously as a moral argument, or at least as a way in which morality could have evolutionarily evolved, is........?

Edit: By the way, bringing up any evolutionary model is a massive shot in the foot on your part insofar as same-sex marriage is concerned, because evolutionary models are all about reproductive advantage, whereas there's no reproductive advantage in same-sex marriage.

In human social and moral terms, overpopulation signifies the point when marriage loses purpose, and so same-sex marriage remains the definitional oxymoron it always was.

No, it's not the last resort. It's the guiding principle. If it were not the guiding principle, there would be no reason to call it rechtsstaat.

You are facing the task of proving that you think at all, morally, epistemologically, metaphysically, metaethically. And the relevance of your ESS model also remains to be separately proven. It's your job to show whether there's anything moral in it and how you derive gay marriage from there.

The world is getting apart and they discuss about homosexuals... 
I wonder what historians and anthropologists 500 years in the future would say about these times.
So I let a message for the future historians - no, it was not my fault.

You are facing the task of proving that you think at all, morally, epistemologically, metaphysically, metaethically.

Before proceeding to the punchline I have to pause to say what I'm even talking about. Moral facts consist of imperatives, and imperatives are statements about what we "ought" to do (or who or what sort of person we ought to be). What does "ought" mean? That which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.

For example, "you ought to change the oil in your car" means "if you knew your car was running low on oil, and you don’t want your car’s engine to seize up, then you would change the oil in your car (as long as you were able to without harm)." If you want your car's engine to seize up, then "you ought to change the oil in your car" is false. But if you don't want that, then "you ought to change the oil in your car" would be objectively true, i.e. it would be true even if you believed it was false. Your opinion of the matter, what you liked or thought, would be irrelevant to its being true. In that case if you said it was false you would simply be mistaken about what you ought to do.

Moral facts are thus facts about the behavior of physical systems, in particular social and neurological systems. Since these and other facts are objective facts of the world (and thus not just opinions), our moral emotions and intuitions can be in error. We can feel guilty for something that wasn't in fact wrong, or feel righteous for doing what is actually vile. Moral facts are thus not opinions. Moral facts are facts about what is and what we want, regardless of what we believe those are. The morality of an act is therefore a property of a physical system: it refers to the physical relations among the components of that system, including (a) the things you want most in the world, which desires are physical structures in your brain, (b) the way the world works generally (such as the way technologies and economies and societies and brains work), and (c) the actual physical circumstances you find yourself in (the "moral context" of a given decision).

Why is it wrong to rape a woman?

Because it hurts a woman.

Why is it wrong to hurt a woman?

Because it's uncompassionate.

Why is it wrong to be uncompassionate?

Because by being an uncompassionate person, your life will suck, more than it would suck if you were a compassionate person. And it is irrational to choose what will make your life suck more, than what you could have chosen instead.

Moral facts consist of imperatives, and imperatives are statements about what we "ought" to do (or who or what sort of person we ought to be). What does "ought" mean? That which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.

That's simply a statement about our beliefs regarding the nature of reality. Everything you say about God and morality is, crudely put, "fictional" from an naturalist perspective. It's also completely irrelevant to the discussion, but you brought it up. Mea culpa for responding to your red herring.

If desires aren't physical then they aren't real, and if they aren't real then my theory of morality has no firm epistemological basis in reality. This is most definitely a valid objection. Naturally, however, I believe that desires (or "wanting") have a neuroscientific, physical basis. Wanting is distinct from pleasure (or "liking"). More concretely, if I lacked a desire for pleasure, then pleasure would be meaningless. Wanting is what causes me to act and decide. By taking desires as my basis, I mean to avoid the charge that utilitarianism or hedonism take an arbitrary property and call it important. In brief, wanting is the only reason which we have for acting that is epistemologically grounded in reality.

Epicurus also used the equivalent to my hamburger example from earlier, just like Buddhists do. Short term indulgence (popularly, and I would argue incorrectly, known as hedonism) leads to long-term dissatisfaction.

Committing to something like marriage, which leads to long-term mental as well as physical health, satisfaction, and well-being, is indeed hedonistic in nature.

Homosexuality occurs all over nature at large, and even if it didn't, their very existence within humanity makes them natural.

If you're using the word in a way disconnected from how people normally use it, that's on you. Defining terms is necessary only if you wish to use them in deviant or (domain) specific ways, such as when I used the word hedonism above, otherwise it's just white noise.

The specifics are obviously in how it improves lives and doesn't do harm, such as how societies with gay marriage have objectively higher well-being than those without.

The reason to take your pedophilia, your nose picking, your Nazis seriously is…?

You already know my argument is that what you called worker bees (or was it ants?) offer a reproductive advantage to their related genes.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 03:33:32

In human social and moral terms, overpopulation signifies the point when marriage loses purpose, and so same-sex marriage remains the definitional oxymoron it always was.

I don't much care what it's called. Sure, a prototypical marriage includes (biological) children, and in that sense gay marriage without adopted children is a bit like a dry river, in much the same way as my own river isn't yet in danger of flooding the surrounding landscape. I admit that in my younger days I voted against the European constitution because it obviously wasn't a constitution.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 03:33:32

No, it's not the last resort. It's the guiding principle. If it were not the guiding principle, there would be no reason to call it rechtsstaat.

The guiding principle of our society is not that most people are psychopaths whose only reason to refrain from doing violence is fear of punishment.

Your morality, metaphysics and metaethics have no epistemological ground, because you don't care about how you know things. You just make things up out of @midnight raccoon's ivory tower. Such is the basic conflict between empiricism and idealism.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 03:33:32

You are facing the task of proving that you think at all, morally, epistemologically, metaphysically, metaethically.

Of course, compared to a "real" philosopher — someone who has dedicated their life to thinking about such broader matters under peer review from other professional thinkers — I am out of my depth, because I only do so in my spare time. A proper philosophical defense of my mode of thinking can generally be found in writings by Richard Carrier, such as here: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.be/2011/03/moral-ontology.html I haven't really been influenced by him in the development of my ideas because I only discovered his writing a couple of years ago, but by and large when I read his arguments I can gladly say that's how I might've expressed it, and insofar as philosophical rigorousness goes how I would express it if I had but world enough and time, so referring to him is usually a safe bet. Specifically look at the header "value realism" and beyond. A few quotations:

Quote

Before proceeding to the punchline I have to pause to say what I'm even talking about. Moral facts consist of imperatives, and imperatives are statements about what we "ought" to do (or who or what sort of person we ought to be). What does "ought" mean? That which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.

For example, "you ought to change the oil in your car" means "if you knew your car was running low on oil, and you don’t want your car’s engine to seize up, then you would change the oil in your car (as long as you were able to without harm)." If you want your car's engine to seize up, then "you ought to change the oil in your car" is false. But if you don't want that, then "you ought to change the oil in your car" would be objectively true, i.e. it would be true even if you believed it was false. Your opinion of the matter, what you liked or thought, would be irrelevant to its being true. In that case if you said it was false you would simply be mistaken about what you ought to do.

Quote

Why is it wrong to rape a woman?

Because it hurts a woman.

Why is it wrong to hurt a woman?

Because it's uncompassionate.

Why is it wrong to be uncompassionate?

Because by being an uncompassionate person, your life will suck, more than it would suck if you were a compassionate person. And it is irrational to choose what will make your life suck more, than what you could have chosen instead.

NB None of this directly is about what particular moral facts are, but only deals with the ontological foundation of how morality physically exists.

Most marriages wind down in a few years and the relationship turns into suffering for both. The reason to keep the commitment is.....? Given hedonism, none.

Cannibalists exists. By your own words, their very existence within humanity ( <-another term you will have to define) makes them natural. Disagree? Then reword what you say. More properly: Think first, then speak.

And you know that this analogy gets you crucified by LGBT ideologists. And hailed by Nazis who think only good pure Arian genes should reproduce, while the labour camp rubble should labour.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 19:58:20

Most marriages wind down in a few years and the relationship turns into suffering for both. The reason to keep the commitment is.....? Given hedonism, none.

Sounds about right. Where's the problem?

Of course cannibalism is natural. That's exactly why something being natural isn't necessarily a particularly relevant thing to note.

Why should I care about some ad hominem? Either it's accurate or it isn't. That's completely unrelated to whether anyone likes it. I like lots of thing that aren't true and I dislike many things that are. Only the reality-challenged think that is something to celebrate rather than to watch out for.

The problem is that the call to commitment proves empty at that point.

Which raises the question why you noted that homosexuality is natural. Let's suppose that homosexuality and cannibalism are natural. So what? Where's the point that is supposed to follow from this? Both are natural, but it's somehow trivially self-evident that homosexuality is morally justified while cannibalism is not?

People often get caught up in you're wrong, and even if you were right you'd still be wrong. This is one of those cases. @midnight raccoon's argument is simply that there's nothing inherently good or bad about the fact that an act is natural, but even if there were, being gay is natural.

Try to survive LGBT(Q etc.) gestapo interrogation with these justifications. It's beyond my power.

Commitment isn't good all by itself.

That's why you dragged in silly things like committing to drugs, but some marriages are indeed destructive like drugs. That being said, it's certainly possible that many of those were stupid for getting married in the first place.

This is something you sometimes see in religious circles, where people often get married more out of lust than anything else.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 21:45:55

Try to survive LGBT(Q etc.) gestapo interrogation with these justifications. It's beyond my power.

Even ignoramuses need nothing but Wikipedia for a quick primer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection

People often get caught up in you're wrong, and even if you were right you'd still be wrong. This is one of those cases. @midnight raccoon's argument is simply that there's nothing inherently good or bad about the fact that an act is natural, but even if there were, being gay is natural.

Homosexual (and other non-reproductive sexual) behaviour begins to fit an evolutionary model at the point when the ecosystem is overpopulated and thus reproduction ceases to be a concern. However, in human social and moral terms, this does not make a case for same-sex marriage. In human social and moral terms, overpopulation signifies the point when marriage loses purpose, and so same-sex marriage remains the definitional oxymoron it always was.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-01, 03:33:32

Homosexual (and other non-reproductive sexual) behaviour begins to fit an evolutionary model at the point when the ecosystem is overpopulated and thus reproduction ceases to be a concern. However, in human social and moral terms, this does not make a case for same-sex marriage. In human social and moral terms, overpopulation signifies the point when marriage loses purpose, and so same-sex marriage remains the definitional oxymoron it always was.

I've a different point on this. At overpopulated systems, marriage doesn't lose purpose or function.

Then why did you mention it? The point is that you mentioned it, but insincerely, self-refutingly. When you said that in marriage the couple should be committed, you really meant "committed as long as they feel like it". And as soon as they stop feeling like it? In the normal world, when someone's mood shifts trump commitment, that's called lack of commitment.

In the original context, you probably thought, "Oakdale should not bring up cannibals, because we already said that humans should not hurt each other. But cannibals hurt each other, so he is doing a non sequitur."

If I'm reading right, then in your own queer way you are here raising truth and realism up as a higher value over and above whether anyone likes it. This is how it should be for any principled thinker (when it isn't, we are not dealing with a principled thinker).

The problem is that when you stay committed to this principle ("committed" in the normal sense, committed to truth regardless if you like it or not, or whether anyone else likes it or not, and you honestly face the consequences of your own thinking against other people's opposing opinion), then in LGBT ideology, the verdict is crucifixion. In LGBT ideology, feelings are everything (precisely in the way you talked about commitment in marriage earlier) and they trump truth and realism. In LGBT ideology, when someone feels offended, then that means you are wrong and you must apologise. You broke the principle on which they operate. They reject your advocacy.

Epistemic recklessness and negligence are moral crimes. If someone knows the truth and they ignore it because they don't like it they are reckless, while if someone doesn't ascertain the truth because they already like an idea they are negligent.

Do you have anything specific in mind? I mean, I'm sure there are LGBT fanatics just like there are fanatics in any other group, but I haven't actually come across any yet. I suppose I should add that I don't go looking either since other fanatics who serve themselves on a platter are more than enough.

I'd probably make a good Jesuit, but there are good reasons not to be a Jesuit.

In LGBT ideology, when someone feels offended, then that means you are wrong and you must apologise. You broke the principle on which they operate. They reject your advocacy.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-02, 08:18:34

In LGBT ideology, when someone feels offended, then that means you are wrong and you must apologise. You broke the principle on which they operate. They reject your advocacy.

As if you know anything about LGBT "ideology" and even as if a single one even exists.

and they issue "LGBTQ certificates" to every institution in the country which are already considered a normalcy, close to a requirement. Such is their power.

and they depose dissenting church politicians (ordinary dissenting politicians go without saying)

the pro-gay side has no rational argument on their side, but they have won the lobbying.

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-03, 06:40:11

and they issue "LGBTQ certificates" to every institution in the country which are already considered a normalcy, close to a requirement. Such is their power.

Are dear. such "Gestapo tactics".....'Here's you piece of paper. Have a nice day'

Quote from: ersi on 2016-07-03, 06:40:11

and they depose dissenting church politicians (ordinary dissenting politicians go without saying)

As if the anti-gay forces here don't try the opposite. Such is politics. A official has a position you opposite, so you support the candidate with an agreeable position to yours. This hardly unique to LGBT.

As far as my contributions go, I was content just to watch you and Belfrager dig your own graves with the moronic conspiracy theory arguments.

As far as my contributions go, I was content just to watch you and Belfrager dig your own graves with the moronic conspiracy theory arguments. To use another analogy, give the enough rope to hang yourselves.