Quote from: Thanatos02... Look everyone, this philosophy discussion is super interesting. Like, really. But can it be taken somewhere else, pretty please? I'd totally read it if you, say, posted it in the off topic section.

Fair enough.  This thread has been thoroughly derailed.  

Quote from: JimBobOz... So yes, different philosophers do sound quite different, but they all seem quite miserable.

No argument there.  :gloomy:

Quote from: JimBobOzYou'd be surprised at how much philosophy I've read; lack of quoting it does not prove lack of having read it. As for how similar the monologues and dialogues of different philosophers are, I'm reminded of what Tolstoy said about families: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So yes, different philosophers do sound quite different, but they all seem quite miserable.

I didn't mean you hadn't read it, just that you might have skipped over most of it in this thread because it didn't have much to do with roleplaying in a roleplaying forum. Something, really, you mention all the time so it seemed reasonable to assume. If that's not the case, well, sorry chief.

Of course, there are lots of different kinds of lots of things. Doesn't make them all miserable. Lao Tzu, for ex, seemed like he was pretty happy with existance. I'm not miserable, and my own philosophy is pretty bleak, myself. But that's for another thread. Cheers, everyone. I look forward to reading more at a different time.

Quote from: JimBobOzSo yes, different philosophers do sound quite different, but they all seem quite miserable.

That's what happens when you think that the answers can be found solely through reason.  Recent studies in how the human mind makes moral decisions (I can provide links to the peer-reviewed research papers if someone wants to be picky) suggests a fairly significant irrational emotional component in the moral decisions that people make.  And thus the poor souls who seek to find the answers to morality in reason alone are doomed to fail to explain human behavior and fail to understand why their carefully crafted rational arguments fail to persuade.  And so strong is their faith that the right answers can be found in reason alone that they fail to notice that rational thinking without a conscience (that irrational emotional moral component) is a pretty good description of a psychopath.

That's a pretty interesting article, Morrow, and I recommend it to others. The summary is that when presented with personal moral dilemmas, a part of the person's brain lights up in activity - but not the part engaged in rational thought; instead it's older, more primitive areas. And monkeys and apes also apparently have a sense of fairness, credit and blame as well.

I also found it interesting because as I've mentioned before, when planning campaigns I often begin with someone faced with a dilemma - love vs duty, the one vs many, and so on; I've found this is very effective at getting players interested in the campaign (when I tie the decisions to their characters in some way) and in getting them to have their characters do things which lead to more dilemmas, and lots of interesting events, and something resembling a "story."

Perhaps that's been so successful in that regard because these sorts of dilemmas touch on something essential to humans, something that's been around since before civilisation?

Interesting. Something for me to think about, and/or discuss in another thread.

Quote from: John MorrowThat's what happens when you think that the answers can be found solely through reason.  Recent studies in how the human mind makes moral decisions (I can provide links to the peer-reviewed research papers if someone wants to be picky) suggests a fairly significant irrational emotional component in the moral decisions that people make.  And thus the poor souls who seek to find the answers to morality in reason alone are doomed to fail to explain human behavior and fail to understand why their carefully crafted rational arguments fail to persuade...

That is an interesting article, but it is hardly earth-shattering news for philosophers.  

The 'emotional' component of moral reasoning has been recognised by philosophers since ancient Greece.  The main thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, et al.) thought that the basis of morality involved the 'moral emotions' or the 'moral sentiments' (indeed, Smith was more famous in his day for his work A Theory of Moral Sentiments than he was for his Wealth of Nations).  

But really, it's not as big a deal as you seem to think -- certainly not a challenge to contemporary ethics as practised by most analytical philosophers.  Indeed, the role of the emotions is widely acknowledged by most leading thinkers working in meta-ethics and moral psychology today (even contemporary Kantians). However, the fact that emotions play a fundamental role in our moral reactions hardly renders reason incapable of critically reflecting on -- and possibly criticising -- them.  Indeed, it is by reason that we come to learn about the psychology of moral decision making in the first place (through rigorous scientific investigation).

There's a basic fallacy at work in a lot of this recent literature on the moral emotions in evolutionary psychology, namely, that explaining how people make moral decisions is the same thing as explaining what morality is (i.e. what in fact is right and wrong).  The two questions are clearly related, but they are nonethless distinct.

Quote from: JimBobOzThat's a pretty interesting article, Morrow, and I recommend it to others. The summary is that when presented with personal moral dilemmas, a part of the person's brain lights up in activity - but not the part engaged in rational thought; instead it's older, more primitive areas. And monkeys and apes also apparently have a sense of fairness, credit and blame as well.

You should read the essay linked to by the word "psychopath" (link copied here), too.  I think that the psychopath, as defined by Robert Hare provides an excellent model for irredeemable evil sentient creatures in role-paying games, too.

Quote from: JimBobOzI also found it interesting because as I've mentioned before, when planning campaigns I often begin with someone faced with a dilemma - love vs duty, the one vs many, and so on; I've found this is very effective at getting players interested in the campaign (when I tie the decisions to their characters in some way) and in getting them to have their characters do things which lead to more dilemmas, and lots of interesting events, and something resembling a "story."

Perhaps that's been so successful in that regard because these sorts of dilemmas touch on something essential to humans, something that's been around since before civilisation?

In the case of things like love vs. duty, you may be on to something.  It's pitting the rational against the emotional, the personal against the impersonal.  Thus maybe it's operating on the level discussed on that article.

Quote from: JimBobOzInteresting. Something for me to think about, and/or discuss in another thread.

Feel free to start another thread if you think it would be useful.

Quote from: AkrasiaThe 'emotional' component of moral reasoning has been recognised by philosophers since ancient Greece.  The main thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, et al.) thought that the basis of morality involved the 'moral emotions' or the 'moral sentiments' (indeed, Smith was more famous in his day for his work A Theory of Moral Sentiments than he was for his Wealth of Nations).

Correct.  And they are all cited if you dig into articles concerning this research (e.g., the paper on Adam Smith on Colin Camerer's web page).  However other philosophers and academics attempt to downplay the importance of that component.  You might find Joshua Greene's book interesting.

Quote from: AkrasiaHowever, the fact that emotions play a fundamental role in our moral reactions hardly renders reason incapable of critically reflecting on -- and possibly criticising -- them.  Indeed, it is by reason that we come to learn about the psychology of moral decision making in the first place (through rigorous scientific investigation).

Correct.  But it means that we are not going to ultimately find an understanding of morality in reason alone, nor is attempting to downplay the emotional component through intellectual criticism necessarily a desirable thing.

Quote from: AkrasiaThere's a basic fallacy at work in a lot of this recent literature on the moral emotions in evolutionary psychology, namely, that explaining how people make moral decisions is the same thing as explaining what morality is (i.e. what in fact is right and wrong).  The two questions are clearly related, but they are nonethless distinct.

Of course.  But if moral decisions are irrational, it's entirely possible that what morality is may not be something that can be captured rationally without missing the point(*).  But I think that the more important paper may be the one on psychopaths and morality.

(*) I understand at a fairly basic level what humor is and how it's created.  For example, I was playing peek-a-boo with my daughter and at one point, instead of popping my head up so she could see me, I grabbed the cat and held the cat up instead.  She started laughing.  Why?  Because the unexpected is often funny.  I intentionally "told" her a non-verbal joke.  But knowing that still does really tell me why it was funny (it was funny because it was unexpected but why are unexpected things funny?) or what humor is.  Sometimes you can chop down every tree and analyze it under a microscope and never find the forest.

Quote from: TonyLBIsn't there?  Though I very much enjoy the play-style in which I spend most of my gaming, I also like to hear about stuff that other people enjoy.  Firstly, it's just fun to hear about people having fun.  Secondly, sometimes it gets to sounding so interesting that I'll take a spin at playing a game the way they play it, because it sounds like it might be fun too.  That way I can have more than just one style of play, the same way a person can have more than one hobby generally.

If you enjoy playing chess does that mean there's no point hearing about what other people enjoy in rock-climbing? :confused:

I'll go ya one better, Tony. I even enjoy talking about what I do enjoy. I've never gotten the "Hey, we enjoyed it, why do we gotta talk about it" camp; I guess I'm just too fascinated with, well, everything. There are a lot of group activities that I enjoy, music for instance, where I just love to sit down afterwards with pizza and beer and talk about what was so awesome and fun and beautiful and magical, back-patting and just generally hanging out, sure,but also unraveling why it worked the way it did, what other ways there might be to do it, how we might do it even better next time, etc. Sure, sometimes after a choir concert we're all talking more about what went wrong, picking apart flaws of the performance, expressing dissatisfaction--but not all the time. And it's interesting and important to unpack the wrong, but ultimately more fascinating to me to dissect and understand the right.

Peace,
-Joel

Quote from: John Morrow... I think that the more important paper may be the one on psychopaths and morality...

I have to say that that's a rather interesting paper.  I'll have to look at it more carefully when I have some time.  Thanks for the link! :cool:

Okay, my apologies for yet another tangential post ... back to the thread topic.

Quote from: AkrasiaSimply because a distinction is 'permeable' doesn't mean that it isn't a legitimate one.

It does give us good grounds to suspect the distinction. Since the legitimacy of the distinction is precisely what's in question here, your response is a non-answer.

QuoteUmmm, where exactly did you explain this devastating criticism of Kant?  All you did was mention a bunch of people who objected to the general distinction between aesthetics and morality, note that this divide emerged at a certain point in history, and remark that both aesthetics and morality were part of 'value theory' (nobody is going to dispute any of that).  

You really do have to start reading what I've written, comrade. As I said earlier, Kant's distinction between moral and aesthetic judgements relies upon the idea that aesthetic judgements are fundamentally subjective in a way that moral judgements aren't. If we refute Kant's notion of what "subjective" means, or if we show that aesthetic judgements are not "fundamentally subjective", we will have shown Kant's distinction between them to be false.

It is my contention that Foucault does the former in showing how the self is constituted as a historical object through an ongoing discourse, and Habermas shows the latter in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (especially) by demonstrating how aesthetic judgements can play a universalizable, moral role within a historical speech community.

Now, I haven't laid out the contentions of each thinker as a set of trite "problems" consisting of some definitions and a syllogism or two, which is probably why you think I haven't mentioned the objection, but that's because I find that kind of thing silly, and even rather inappropriate when dealing with authors writing in other traditions who don't write to be broken down in that way.

QuoteIt's not a sign of 'sloppy thinking'.  Rather, it's simply a quip that was not meant to be taken overly seriously (but that nonetheless roughly reflects my overall evaluation of most thinkers labelled as 'post-modern').

Actually, it is sloppy thinking. If "post-modern" jargon is obscure, then I fail to see how Kantian jargon is any more tolerable. For that matter, the jargon of analytic philosophy is hardly transparent ("analyticity", the endless -isms). The dismissal of "post-modern" philosophy by analytic philosophers tends to be the silliest sort of parochialism, nothing more.

Kant basically forces you to learn a new version of German vocabulary. It´s a jargon-fest. Don´t know how that is handled in translated works.

So, I was thinking. So far, I haven't really gotten the thrust of Sett's arguement and didn't want to just blow it off because it seemed I hadn't figured out what he meant. I'm hoping it can maybe get cleared up for me as I ask some questions.

For one, I can understand how one might game in good faith. That is, game with honesty and acknowledge one's gaming status. Is that what you meant by moral?

For another, I can understand how morals might become an issue in the scope of the game. Are you talking about addressing morals in terms of things like a Paladin's Code, alignment, mormons?

I wouldn't be sure how one would come to the conclusion that a type of playstyle possesses a better moral value then another. Is that what you were saying?

Did I miss something?

Quote from: Settembrini
Kant basically forces you to learn a new version of German vocabulary. It´s a jargon-fest. Don´t know how that is handled in translated works.

There are standard glosses for most of the terms in English by now. Hegel and Heidegger translations are much more chaotic.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineThere are standard glosses for most of the terms in English by now. Hegel and Heidegger translations are much more chaotic.

When I teach Heidegger, I give the kids a spiel on "Vom Ereignis": should that be "Of the Event" or "From Enowning"? The latter is beyond groan, but hey, it's accurate.

Quote from: TonyLBIsn't there?  Though I very much enjoy the play-style in which I spend most of my gaming, I also like to hear about stuff that other people enjoy.  Firstly, it's just fun to hear about people having fun.  Secondly, sometimes it gets to sounding so interesting that I'll take a spin at playing a game the way they play it, because it sounds like it might be fun too.  That way I can have more than just one style of play, the same way a person can have more than one hobby generally.

If you enjoy playing chess does that mean there's no point hearing about what other people enjoy in rock-climbing? :confused:

I'd be willing to include curiosity as a legit 4th category... although I'm not entirely certain it's not covered in my third one.

Cheers,
-E.