QuoteLet's reverse this. If God's existence defines all order, and morality exists because he chooses and establishes it, then in a universe with no God, why can't morality exists because a person exists, and their opinion is the only one that matters? It's a bankrupt position.

Because person is not authothelic, not sovereign and generally not source of reality, but merely one element among many. Separation and individuality is merely biologically convenient illusion.

QuoteLet's say that tomorrow, all-out warfare breaks out and a nuclear exchange occurs that wipes out 90% of the human species in a month. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? If you think that's objectively a bad thing, then we can talk about the particulars of what is moral in different circumstances. If you don't believe that is objectively a bad thing, you don't believe in morality. You're not even a very serious human being, you are a bystander.

Considering I am not consequential ethic and I cannot judge morality of happenings, because sheer notion of giving moral value to them is absurd to me.
Of course nuclear warfare consist of countless decisions - probably mostly evil of people leading it, but ultimately result is just happening. Just like meteor hitting Earth and killing most of mankind is not good thing or bad thing, it's just a thing. Morality I care about exist in realm of human decisions (assuming humans are able to really make any decissions) not artifacts of matter.

And I'm absolutely serious - if I get cancer it's unpleasant to say very least, but it's not good thing or bad thing in moral sense.

QuoteIf you believe that if God, or His agents, ordered us to initiate a nuclear exchange, wiping out 90% of humanity, and we did, that it would be good because it is God commands, then "good" doesn't mean anything I care about.

Well I cannot say I care much about such delusion. What you care about compared to objective order is irrelevant.

QuoteAnd this concludes the first nine weeks grading period of Ethics 201. Hope you got something out of it.

Truly proof modern academia is doom of philosophy.

QuoteBeing "wrong" with a God that wants us to die in nuclear warfare is not a moral condition I'm afraid of... nor should it be for any rational human being, or anyone with an actual, functional sense of morality.

Terribly judgemental. If there is no objective morality then your judgements here are kinda worthless. If there is no God, not transcendence, just accidents of matter - then neither desire to procreate and growth OR desire to destroy all life on earth are neither rational or irrational, because since life is accidental and ultimately purposeless you are not breaking real purpose by just nuking entire planet (not to say lack of free will basically make it merely internal movements of universe). And since there is no objective morality - then everyone has actual functional sense of morality, they are just well let's say incompatible across human species - and your is not special, and people who want to eat you and your entire family up to seven generations, are no less or more moral - because there is simply not any scale to compare it.

We will eat you, and that's good, noble, proper and cool

Quote from: pawsplay on November 30, 2023, 10:14:13 PM

Quote from: MeganovaStella on November 30, 2023, 09:53:57 PM
so in other words, you agree with moral nihilism: good and evil don't exist out of the imaginations of a few naked apes.

...then why are you morally lecturing us?

How is that nihilistic? Are you saying the birth, life and deaths of a few apes isn't significant to you? Sad.

How should we determine what is significant?

Quote from: Wrath of God on December 01, 2023, 09:14:50 PM
Because person is not authothelic, not sovereign and generally not source of reality, but merely one element among many. Separation and individuality is merely biologically convenient illusion.

If there is no God, you are completely sovereign. If there is absolutely no higher authority or purpose that can define morality for you, then you have the same authority as a supreme God. No one can tell you otherwise. The justification based on "sovereignty" makes the nihilistic argument the same as the divine command one. If there is no higher power, there is no one to say what level of reality is illusion, or if anything matters at all.

I do agree that separatoin and individuality are are an illusion.

It's not me that has a problem believing in an objective standard of morality. If you need some powerful supernatural being to define it for you, then you never had it and it never existed in the first place.

I don't really see how you get from atheism to solipsism. Just because there is no god doesn't mean you have magical powers that grant you control over objective morality/reality and normative measures in the abstract. Or that you don't have to worry about objective reality kicking your shit in regardless of what illusions one may wish to believe. Not even if everybody else is dead or you're the only person/worldview, unless this is all secretly a Mage: The Ascension campaign.

Actually, in point of fact, there could still be objective morality without a deity or revelatory force, it's just that if it's randomly generated rather than generated by prior divine command or similar, it's probably both infinite and not guessable. Which means you will fail to achieve it, both mathematically speaking with respect to finding it, and then also accounting for the finite nature of the human mind and existence. You would still be morally answerable to it, though, by definition. And if one were to assume the absence of magical morality indicators/communicators, assuming one doesn't believe in such a thing, there is no way of knowing through observation one way or another whether there is or is not morality in the objective sense. Which would make trying to claim it doesn't exist an argument from ignorance at best, and I guess nihilism's chances of being right maybe even less than 50% probable at any given point in time. Because either there's genuinely no moral revelatory force/magical moral markers, and morality could theoretically exist without you knowing at about a 50% probability, since the observable outcome would be the same either way... Or a moral revelatory force does exist and only serves as evidence that morality must therefore exist. Basically the chances of it not existing under  such circumstances are capped at 50%, and can dip below that depending on aforementioned evidence.

So yeah, more like if you don't believe in some powerful supernatural being or force that can communicate or define objective morality... You are either right and never had nor will you ever have a connection to objective morality (which still has at least a 50% chance of existing). Or you are wrong and probably are failing to achieve it in part due to that mistaken belief. In order not to abandon your ethical post, it therefore actually makes sense to believe in some sort of communicative moral force. That said, I guess all else being equal, those who believe in such a force are probably statistically more likely to be correct morally in arguments like this one, from an objective perspective. According to the basic mathematics underlying the scenario. Maybe. This last paragraph was a bit of a leap, and I'm still working out my reasoning on this. As devil's advocate, maybe one could just stumble upon a stated moral code that is common within the world due to divine command and related understanding by others, and effectively profit off of their discovery by believing in it/following it more or less blindly despite not believing in a divine revelatory force. Of course, that would still be a bad strategy compared to legit searching for the truth and listening to the moral revelatory force, and would fail if acknowledging said force was part of morality, so, meh. *shrugs*

This all perhaps raises an interesting question... Is Woke/Humanism/Whatever Moral Code a religion/belief system by default, if it's by rational default entering into this kind of philosophical territory? I kind of feel like belief in discoverable objective good/evil/morality requires some sort of magic/supernatural/whatever-flavor-indicator to make it work rationally. And if it isn't working rationally due to its holders' cognitive dissonance, that's arguably just in good company with other moral systems and religions that in many cases arguably don't make much sense.   

Also, I really seem to have gotten off track relative to my earlier tangible reality points about corporate practices within the industry, looking back.

Greetings!

God defines *Man*, the Universe, and everything in it. Man doesn't define shit, except what God has commanded Man to do. Any individual that believes that *they* themselves define morality, Good and Evil, and are the supreme authority are delusional and full of shit. In the end, God will laugh at them and their arrogance and stupidity, and ultimately God will judge them for their heresy and rebellion, and they shall be thrown down into Hell, where their is endless torment and gnashing of teeth. They shall be justly damned for their rebellion.

Paul tells us that Man being moral and Good is a lie from Satan. No man is Good, no not one. ALL have sinned before God, and all have fallen short of the glory of God, and deserve judgement and damnation for their sin and rebellion. It is only by the grace and salvation of Christ Jesus that we may be redeemed for our sins and rebellion, and reconciled with God the Father. It is only by Christ that we may enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: pawsplay on December 01, 2023, 07:45:18 PM

Quote from: KindaMeh on December 01, 2023, 07:35:42 PM
Your not caring wouldn't stop you from being morally in the wrong.

Being "in the wrong" is a valueless statement in that context. Being "wrong" with a God that wants us to die in nuclear warfare is not a moral condition I'm afraid of... nor should it be for any rational human being, or anyone with an actual, functional sense of morality.

But to bring this back around, neither moral relativism nor moral cynicism are characters of "woke" political movements in general, nor to RPG segments of the community specifically. That's just a silly notion. People support BLM because they believe protecting Black people's safety and dignity is good, and overbearing, violent, and unregulated policing is bad. Saying something is harmful or something is beneficial is something about which you can debate the objective truth. There may not be a final, monumental statement that succinctly describes every situation; some situations are complex; any moral argument based on actual justice or utility requires some kind of framing in time; and yet, we can still broadly agree on things like it's wrong to hurt innocent people, either willfully or through unconscionable neglect. People who don't agree on stuff like aren't actually concerned with right or wrong in the first place.

  No people support BLM because they have a fervent, zealous, religious level of belief that what BLM espouses and rants is truth without taking a closer look at anything they stand behind or at the people who are driving that monstrosity.   in short because they are just stupid.  Stupid and dangerous.  Others are going to "support" with hashtags or virtue signaling for a different reason, because they fear stupid dangerous people and pretending to care about what they care about is protection enough most of the time.   

Quote from: pawsplay on December 01, 2023, 02:00:54 AM

Quote from: BadApple on December 01, 2023, 01:41:09 AM
Try to find much of anything about sexuality in D&D products before 2000. 

Random harlot table. Naked succubus. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos is ruled by Stefan Karameikos, and his wife, Olivia, with whom he has three children.

The world's oldest profession - Don't let them see any Renaissance nudes in art class - Normal Nuclear Family.

So much Hetero! Lots of SEX SEX SEX!!!

Hetero Sex everywhere!!  So Unfair to tiny percent of Sodomites and Thespians!

Oh Noes! Must be Cis-Conspiracy!

Need more Sodomy. Must Normalize!

Hetero Bad. LGBTQP Good!

Must have Sodomy mentioned in RPG!

Like, all the time! Preferably in Drag!

You don't want to be Homophobe do you?

Homophobe = BAD WRONG EVIL!!!!

Why you no like Sodomy in RPG!?

You BAD WRONG EVIL???

Quote from: migo on October 25, 2023, 11:35:18 AM

Quote from: Trond on October 25, 2023, 11:25:50 AM

Quote from: migo on October 25, 2023, 08:55:05 AM
I'm not American, and have spent less than 24 hours in my entire life inside American borders.

It's the same shit outside America too.

Can confirm from Northern Europe and Canada. Sweden is possibly worst since they fell hard for feminism and self flagellation a long time ago, though I haven't spent that much time in Sweden specifically

I would expect that in Sweden ttRPGs don't stand out compared to other hobbies and sub-cultures as having been so thoroughly SJW-infested, not because they're not thoroughly infested, but because others are just as bad.

Sweden has produced a few popular RPGs and Wargames.

Drakkar och Demoner was a really popular one over there and seems to have been inspired by Runequest, complete with ducks. Also the origin of the Mutant RPG and the Mutant Chronicle wargame and board game. Probably more I am unaware of. Chronopocalypse or somesuch fantasy wargame?

No idea what they have lest today. I know around 2010 there was an ill-concieved try at reviving MC but with 50mm minis. That crashed. Mophidus I think was till recently putting out a MC Siege on the Citadel board game remake of the original. There was even a MC live action movie that had about nothing to do with the setting.

QuoteIf there is no God, you are completely sovereign.

On the contrary. If there is no God, then I'm illusion of person, accidental result of matter, dragged by strings I cannot mostly perceive and so is every living being in reality.

Quote
If there is absolutely no higher authority or purpose that can define morality for you, then you have the same authority as a supreme God.

On the contrary, because Absolute still exist - and it's mindless, cold, deterministic Universe of which I'm just part, with illusion of grandeur, when consciousness is like Peter Watts claim - basically disease. I have no Authority whatsoever, because I cannot decide anything. Because there is no I - merely illusion of I generated by sense called consciousness as a way to coordinate together functions of brains. Determinism is a bitch.

QuoteNo one can tell you otherwise. The justification based on "sovereignty" makes the nihilistic argument the same as the divine command one. If there is no higher power, there is no one to say what level of reality is illusion, or if anything matters at all.

Then nothing actually matters.

QuoteIt's not me that has a problem believing in an objective standard of morality. If you need some powerful supernatural being to define it for you, then you never had it and it never existed in the first place.

And here typical lefists nonsense return.
First it's ok that nothing matters and it's all worthless illusion - do whatever, but now - if you lack my imagined standard of morality you never had any morality whatsoever.
That's bullshit man - if your metaphysic is correct, any standard of morality is a lie, and therefore basically never existing thing. Whether you define it yourself, from book or from licking toxic snails.

Those two views does not compute. My objective standard may be real, only because it does not exist in me. If it does not exist at all then whatever I guess, but I can say for certain your is FALSE by your all decree. And non-existent and therefore unworthy of any discussion as you admited to pull it out of your ass by power of magic and rainbows.

Quote from: MeganovaStella on November 30, 2023, 12:23:00 AM
I will immediately derail this thread by espousing a belief in Moral Nihilism and demand evidence that morality is intrinsic to the universe.

There are universally preferable behaviors.  For example, people prefer not to be stolen from, lied to, assaulted, raped, and/or murdered.  Thus those behaviors are regarded as evil by everyone.

If evil exists, then to do the opposite(or to not do those evill acts) would be considered "good".  Hence universally intrinsic morality.

Voila!

Quote from: Wrath of God on December 02, 2023, 08:27:37 PM
Then nothing actually matters.

QuoteIt's not me that has a problem believing in an objective standard of morality. If you need some powerful supernatural being to define it for you, then you never had it and it never existed in the first place.

And here typical lefists nonsense return.
First it's ok that nothing matters and it's all worthless illusion - do whatever, but now - if you lack my imagined standard of morality you never had any morality whatsoever.
That's bullshit man - if your metaphysic is correct, any standard of morality is a lie, and therefore basically never existing thing. Whether you define it yourself, from book or from licking toxic snails.

Those two views does not compute. My objective standard may be real, only because it does not exist in me. If it does not exist at all then whatever I guess, but I can say for certain your is FALSE by your all decree. And non-existent and therefore unworthy of any discussion as you admited to pull it out of your ass by power of magic and rainbows.

I'm not sure where you skipped a track, but I'm not advocating for a person defining their own morality in absolute terms. I am arguing in favor of objective morality. The argument you are dissecting is what happens when you take all the arguments for a morality system based on divine command, and apply them to that cold and empty universe. Because believing in a God that has no morality, and morality is just whatever they say it is, is exactly like living in a universe with no God. A God who is not good is simply a pitiless, cold universe with no all-emanating source of meaning in it.

I'm saying it's an absolute joke to say you can't have morality without God. Plenty of the best people on Earth don't believe in a personal God, and plenty of people who do, are terrible. There is actually a Jewish story that concerns itself with "why God created atheists." There's a version in Tales from the Hasidim. But getting that far into the nitty gritty is probably going rather afield from the purpose of this forum.

Suffice it to say, I'm on the side of people against annihilation and tyranny, and against those would bring it about, whether willfully or through misplaced values or ignorance.

Further, it's more useful to focus on ethics absent a specific set of divine commands, because you can have ethical discussions with people who don't share your religion. Specific dogma and axioms I feel have an important role in culture and society, but are not themselves the source of morality. A dogma without human intellect guiding it, is like the Golem of Prague, doing the task it commanded, erratically, without any consideration of its purpose. This can be located in observations about Jewish morality, such as the observation that God's command to propagate and protect life supercedes specific ordinances, in matters of true need. In Christianity, you have "do unto others as they would do unto you," and also Jesus saying, only do this: do not reject the Holy Spirit. A Buddhist, a Christian, and a Jew can have a productive conversation about ethics, even if they disagree on many significant points. But two Christians can disagree, and become enemies, if the substance is about the meaning of a particular command, and this takes precedence over the broader points of agreement. Divine command theory had its time during the Middle Ages, but just has not held up as an authorship of morals.

If you think a leftist, "woke" person doesn't have a moral sense, doesn't understand ethics, and doesn't value human freedom and life, you are likely to make various errors and assumptions. It would be like if I suggested right-wingers don't have any good purposes in mind. I would bet the vast majority of you would help a wounded dog on the road, would give your lunch to a starving child, might even put your body between a killer and those you love. I don't think human goodness is a monopoly owned by any segment of humanity.

The suggestion that game companies are motivated solely by "pandering" or "virtue signaling" assigns a value to something without a clear purpose. Companies pander to money, all of them, to a lesser or greater extent. There's no ideological reason there, they sell things people want to buy, and don't sell things people hate. Virtue signaling, in a real anthropological sense, means doing something with a clear cost, to demonstrate your actual commitment to a sense of values. For instance, Chick-Fil-A doesn't sell fried chicken on Sundays, despite the fact that is the absolute best day to sell friend chicken in the South. It costs them millions, if not billions of dollars. That's actual virtue signalling. And what it shows is that their reasons for doing so are probably sincere, and not amenable to persuasion. So when you say a "woke person" is "virtue signaling," what you would literally be saying is they'd rather take a hit in the wallet than go against their values. Which is often true. The suggestion that some people pretend to have values, when it's easy or convenient, is often true, but that's a component of wokeness; that's just a general phenomenon of people who don't have an ideology at all. When someone says they want to see more Black characters in games and more Black creators being published and promoted, it's because they think that would be better. It's not likely for some kind of general cred or anything, because there isn't really money in that, for one thing.

The idea there is a woke "cult" is laughable. Progressives are nothing if not disunited. Currently, there is still a cool war waging on Mastodon between several Black instances and several queer instances, about who is not being intersectional and tolerant. If that's a cult, I can't imagine what the agenda is, or what values you think are being enforced. Wokeness, itself, is about individual conscience; it's about being awake, in a world where it's easy to be a sleepwalker, neither doing good nor identifying evil. Wokeness is similar to any other political call to action that asks people to examine if they are living a morally aware life, and if they recognize things being done to them they don't like.

What some of you need to understand is that plenty of left-leaning creators are as stubbornly willing to lose market share by advertising their beliefs, as are the right-leaning creators. Right and left people "virtue signal" in the sense of demonstrating a real willingness to take a loss or injury, rather than compromise their values. Once you stop seeing people as caricatures, perhaps you will start to have a real sense of what you are up against.

NGL, I seriously misinterpreted your earlier position despite responding to your specific arguments, and for that I apologize. I am sincerely very relieved to hear that you legit believe in objective morality, even if I don't agree with you on a lot of the particulars, nor your negative characterization of systems of divine metaphysical belief. Nor what I had previously been reading as active hostility for religion and other people's beliefs there more broadly, but which may not actually be your own personal position. I'm still going to stick up for my beliefs and try to explain what I was actually trying to communicate, but you do indeed deserve an apology in all likelihood, so yeah.

That said, to segue into what I was trying to say on morals...

If you argue in favor of objective morality, why not also argue in favor of a communicative moral force or magical moral indicators which can communicate these subtleties, as existing within the laws of the universe? That was basically my core question. Firstly, it makes the argument a whole lot easier to advance and prove. Secondly, as noted earlier, without that and with a randomly generated morality, neither you nor anybody else on earth will ever be finding/following it within the context of the infinite possibilities for what it could be and its presumably infinite size. At least with divine command theory and/or divine grace, which by the way does not intrinsically require a changing or what most people would deem Lovecraftian-esque deity, morality may be made either finite or mankind through grace potentially made to transcend our limitations that prevent say an infinite morality from being properly achieved. And again, if objective morality doesn't agree with the  human stomach, then whilst subjectively I'd agree it'd be very sad/suck, there would indeed still be a moral imperative to follow it, which was essentially part of the philosophical point I was trying to make. Incredulity or disagreement with an objective moral principle doesn't make it invalid. Much like disagreement with the rational calculus behind moral infinities and the like wouldn't in and of itself disprove what I have been trying to say.

Also, I'd agree that atheists can follow moral precepts. Of course I believe that, since I believe in both a divine communicative moral force and divine grace that is available to them, even if indirectly perhaps at times for the former. However, if there is no communicative moral force, and there is nobody to tailor morality to limited and achievable scope, it simply does not make sense to me to believe that humans can be following the objective moral code of the universe, even if it should exist. Which constitutes a problem, because people are relatively smart, and they will figure this out eventually. So in a sense, I'd argue that the belief in religious ties to morality, or magical moral indicators or what have you, actually serves a solid ethical and moral purpose, in that it makes trying to achieve morality potentially rational. As well as making argumentation as to morality's first causes and core principles a lot more viable, for obvious reasons. I legit thought you might be a moral relativist or nihilist or actively hate that kind of reasoning/religious beliefs or something from how I earlier read your stuff, to help explain why I thought that explaining this might be necessary.

I'll possibly get into the more thread-topic relevant stuff within your post later on, but again apologies for prospectively misinterpreting and mistargeting that earlier part of the conversation.

The real problem is that for most of the IP owners, who didn't create the material and don't feel any special connection to it, it's considered less hassle to simply pay off the troublemakers by giving in to their demands, shelling out chump change to them, or both*. Eventually, this backfires because it pisses off loyal customers who will not only NOT buy the new product, but will go elsewhere to spend their money -or in many cases, will find new pastimes.

I watched the NFL religiously since 1978. By 2016 I was done and haven't watched more than a few minutes of any pro football game. The same goes for Star Wars, which I started watching in 1977 and stopped watching after Solo. I quit Hasbro D&D more than 20 years ago and never looked back. Fretting over things you used to like out of misplaced loyalty or nostalgia is unhealthy and a waste of time.

*Norman Finkelstein, himself a hardcore lefty, describes this kind of payoff at length in his newest book, I'll Burn That Bridge When I get To It: