(Part 3) Best ethics & moral philosophy books according to redditors
We found 917 Reddit comments discussing the best ethics & moral philosophy books. We ranked the 361 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
I think it's important to understand that cultural appropriation doesn't refer to merely using the styles and traditions of other cultures and incorporating them into your own. That's not problematic in the abstract. But when we start looking at particular instances, we can start to see when such things might become more problematic. Here's an example:
>“Dread locks” refer to a style of hair from the Afro-Caribbean tradition that is a direct form of resistance by black people to white supremacy and white standards of beauty. The term “dread locks” actually refers to how black folks in Caribbean nations were often referred to by the white slave owners as the “dread people” because they were seen as dreaded and lowly. The act of “locking” one’s hair was in resistance to white standards of beauty and white oppression that told black people of the Caribbean that they were not beautiful and that they needed to wear their hair a certain way.
>So why is it problematic for white people to wear their hair as “dread locks?” Well, to understand this, it is important that we understand the concept of cultural appropriation. It defines appropriation as, “The act of making use of without any authority or right.” The basic idea of cultural appropriation is when a group (usually the dominant group in society, though not always) takes aspects of another person’s culture without permission and adopts it as part of its own, often without recognition to the roots and history of the cultural tradition in question.
So we have to pay close attention to the without recognition to the roots and history of the cultural tradition in question bit. Look at the ensuing paradoxical nature of a white ruling class individual from the Caribbean adopting a hair style whose roots were planted firmly as an act of resistance against the ruling class. Not only is it strange to adopt a hair style that symbolized the struggle of the disenfranchised when you yourself are a member of the ruling class, but doing so trivializes their grievances against you and doesn't seem to really respect the tradition as an embodiment of the struggle for human equality.
Notice also that using elements from other cultures and blending them into something new isn't what's wrong, it's the state of mind with which its done. Not bothering to understand the origin of the tradition or cultural practice, merely treating cultural artifacts as mere objects to synthesize, rather than understand, is what it's at fault. Appropriation can be done without it being problematic, but that requires you to be a thoughtful individual who goes out of his way to understand the traditions you're attempting to bring into the fold. And the problem is that that kind of intellectual responsibility isn't something you find often. Hardly anyone bothers to stop and think whether dressing up as an Indian for Halloween might be problematic, nor would they ever give consideration to the role that dreadlocks played on the colonial history of the Caribbean.
So it's just a matter of being a thoughtful individual and someone who incorporates elements from other traditions in a tasteful manner. But the knee-jerk reaction to suggestions of cultural appropriation is to outright dismiss it without ever bothering to understand the claims being made. We can do better.
Jason Brennan thinks that it's immoral for the poorly informed to vote. He explains this briefly here, and has a longer book on the subject.
Abstract
Dr Skye Cleary is a philosopher and author, best known for her work in the field of existentialism. As well as teaching at Columbia, Barnard College and the City College of New York, Skye is also the associate director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University.
Skye’s contribution to the world of public philosophy has been extensive, writing for a wealth of publications, including The Paris Review, TED-Ed, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Aeon, Business Insider, The Independent and New Philosopher magazine. Skye is also the editor of the American Philosophical Association blog and the author of our focus for this episode, her 2015 book, Existentialism and Romantic Love.
We’re going to be discussing with Skye the idea of romantic love, and what we can learn about love from existentialist philosophers such as Max Stirner, Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Friedrich Nietzsche. In a world of romantic cinema, novels, love songs, dating apps, and self-help books, the dream of romantic love has been sold to many of us, but Skye Cleary thinks we need to take a step back. The worry, is that we might blindly sacrifice our freedom, offload our happiness onto another person, or use them as a means to our own ends. Existentialism teaches us that we should aim to live authentically and embrace our freedom. Our question for this episode, is whether or not our current understanding of romantic love is compatible with such a view. Can Jack meet Jill fall in love, and not fall down the hill? Should we, can we, and why, should we love?
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He has done alot of work on logic and ethics, something we need more of in gaming journalism.
http://www.amazon.com/Vice-Virtue-Everyday-Christina-Sommers/dp/1111837546/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412654956&sr=1-1
If one of the comments in the post /u/aLienWINGz linked is right, this is it.
I would start with his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, which is something like a condensed version of the Critique of Pure Reason. It's somewhat more straightforward, though obviously it is also quite a bit less detailed.
If you feel like you are able to get a good handle on the Prolegomena, then move on to the Critique itself.
If you're interested in the moral philosophy, start with the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and then move on to the Critique of Practical Reason (and from there, if you want, to the Metaphysics of Morals).
With Kant, the devil is in the details. If you have a good idea of the broader themes and motivations of the three Critiques, then you will be able to work your way through them. Just reading them straightaway can be a bit challenging because the details in Kant can get extremely tricky, and sometimes it can be easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees.
I got to the end of your post then I saw you have maybe peaced out, which most "science explains everything, why is everyone so mad at Sam Harris" people tend to do sooner or later when confronted with a philosopher on the Internet, so hopefully my post won't fall on deaf ears.
Your idea of contingency doesn't seem to engage moral oughts on the correct level. You are correct that it is contingent what things are good for human beings in one sense: if our biology were different, then different things would be good for us. Eating food is good for us - we might've evolved so that it is bad for us. Dying is (we might think) bad for us, but we might've evolved/been created such that we were immortal (like your AIs) and then dying wouldn't be bad for us. And so on.
This contingency does not threaten any kind of morality, though, and it certainly doesn't threaten anyone who thinks the is/ought gap is a thing. Notice that any morality is going to have to deal with contingency already because lots of things are contingent. "Should I donate money to this charity?" Well, the answer to that question depends on a ton of contingent things. That you even exist in the first place is contingent - your parents could've never met. That the charity exists is also contingent. And so on.
So simply because morality has to deal with contingent facts about the world, even contingent facts about the world that have moral implications, does not mean the is/ought gap is meaningless. All it means is that we need to tell some story about linking up contingent facts about how the world is with other facts (contingent or necessary) about how the world ought to be.
Hume argues that no moral theory has effectively made that leap - he thinks "is" and "ought" are different terms, and that you can't license an inference with "ought" in it from premises containing only "is" statements. Various philosophers have ways around this - it's up to you to decide which of them, if any, you agree with.
Your approach seems like a version of teleological ethics: what is fundamentally "good" has something to do with the kind of lifeform we are looking at. This kind of ethics has its roots in Aristotle, and the most recent serious proponent I can think of who pushes a lifeform-based teleology is Philippa Foot in her book Natural Goodness. The book is fairly short, so it might be a nice place to start. I'm flipping through it now and her footnotes could be better, so you might need to hit up /r/askphilosophy if you hit something that doesn't make sense, but whatever.
For Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp Smith and Guyer/Wood are both good options, but I would recommend the Pluhar translation.
If you want to try to read the Critique, you should first read Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. He wrote it to introduce the project of the Critique, and it does an excellent job at this. It's available in the Cambridge collection edition as part of Theoretical Philosophy After 1781 or on its own.
Secondary literature would also be a good idea. The best reference is Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Allison interprets Kant a very specific way on a number of contentious issues. For excellent references which adopt some alternate views, see Guyer's Kant and Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. All of these would be excellent secondary references and of great help in approaching the Critique. Guyer's Kant is probably the easiest read, so might be a good place to start.
For Descartes, you should get the first two volumes of the Cottingham edition called The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. The Discourse is an excellent place to start. With it you should also read The World and at least some of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind; perhaps the first six or so, or more if you find them interesting. These are all in the first volume. After these, you should read his Meditations, which are in volume two.
I’m no philosopher, and wouldn’t be able to articulate it as well as others have. If you truly care, there is a wide variety of literature on the subject.
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/kenan-malik-on-morality-without-god/
http://ebooks.bharathuniv.ac.in/gdlc1/gdlc4/Arts_and_Science_Books/arts/philosophy/Books/Elements%20of%20Moral%20Philosophy.pdf
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Morality-Introduction-Ethics-Bernard-Williams/dp/0521457297
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/052143971X/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_yewmAbY8W8TGR
Has anyone here read The Ethics of Voting? It's super relevant.
You might consider Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity, co-authored by Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson, Blackwell 1996. Harman defends relativism; Thomson defends objectivity; and they both reply to each other's arguments.
The absolute easiest of his books is Demanding the Impossible. It is an extended interview, so it broken up into relatively concise and self-contained sections for each question.
If you're looking for full book that's still on the easy side, I would check out Trouble in Paradise or First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which are on similar topics. His book Violence is also quite readable, but I think the other three make better introductions to his thought.
Read this: https://smile.amazon.com/HighBridge-Division-of-Recorded-Books/dp/B00X0TKUS0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1537520998&sr=8-1&keywords=48+laws+of+power
First, a clear implication of your question - if nothing else, implied by the use of the term "good book" - was that you were looking for the atheist equivalent of the Bible.
One of my points, then, is that the Bible doesn't live up to the characterization of "good book", let alone "definitive" (because its interpretations are so diverse). As such, you're asking for something that millennia of religion didn't succeed in coming up with.
> I'm precisely asking for a moral guide that is not religious.
Yes, that was rather clear from the "for atheists" bit of your first sentence.
What you actually asked for, though, is "a definitive 'good book' for atheists". One sense in which this appears to be requesting something similar to like the Bible is the "definitive" part. A definitive book implies absolute morality, because otherwise it can't possibly be definitive.
> And why would the fact that there are bad moral guides necessarily mean that all future moral guides are bad?
Until humanity figures out a credible way to come up with an absolute moral system that applies across all cultures across time and space, the problem again is your stated desire for a "definitive" answer. I am suggesting that future attempts at moral guides are unlikely to be definitive.
> To answer, many moral problems are tough. some people with no religion are interested in gaining moral wisdom, from a non religious source. I think a book like this would be good for that.
There's a huge body of literature on morality and ethics that is based on secular thought. But there's none that can qualify as a definitive moral guide, just as there's no such book for the religious.
Much of the literature on morality focuses around studying morality itself, rather than trying to prescribe a morality. There are many introductory books in this space. One you might try is "Morality - An Introduction to Ethics".
The reason books prescribing morality are less common is because morality is much more culture-dependent, relative, and fluid than most people recognize. Without constraining the book to a particular culture or context, it would be difficult for such a guide to be useful. Instead, books about morality tend to discuss how to grapple with moral issues, and reach moral decisions on your own.
Since Tyson's list included a novel (viz. Gulliver's Travels), a great book like Middlemarch could be fairly included if you absolutely have to have a token "female perspective." And while they may not at this time have risen to the rank of "Great Books of the Western World," I can see how someone might personally find works by philosophers like Philippa Foot or G. E. M. Anscombe important enough to say that everyone should read them.
It's the third chapter of his book Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, called 'Interlude: Relativism'. It's frequently anthologised on its own, as a classic reading against (most forms of) relativism. I think the four chapter sequence that book starts with is the best discussion of subjectivism in ethics you'll find anywhere. The book as a whole is fantastic (and very short, which helps), but it is notorious for becoming more difficult the further you get in it, and at a pretty rapid pace as well.
Well, I am most persuaded by an argument that I sort of concocted myself. I largely agree with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and so for a time I tried to determine what his position would be on abortion, since he never explicitly wrote on the topic and it wasn't a big issue in the 19th century. I concluded that he would likely be opposed to it, given certain of his claims and the fact that, despite being non-religious himself, he held many positions that would be considered "conservative" today.
One claim he makes, for example, is that it is wrong to forcibly deny the will of another to live, except in cases of self-defense. A human embryo or fetus naturally wills to live and so it is wrong to destroy it. The abortionist may counter by saying that the word "another" refers to a person, and a human embryo or fetus is not a person. But here Schopenhauer would be able to respond by saying that the will of the human embryo/fetus being aborted is its own distinct Platonic Idea, such that to abort it is to destroy an individual person.
One upshot to this argument is that it avoids all the debates about whether fetuses can feel pain, are suitably conscious, etc. My argument references not physical but metaphysical harm, as it were. The fetus's will is being harmed when aborted, if not its physical body. Even if one does not buy into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, I have noticed that similar arguments have been made, as in the following book (whose author speaks of the "substance" of a human being instead of Platonic Ideas, though they function much the same):
https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Life-Against-Abortion-Choice/dp/0521691354/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496942073&sr=1-4
I also agree with the other arguments presented in this thread.
To answer your second question (sort of), Hannah Arendt went over questions of national responsibility in excruciating detail so agree with her or not, worry no more!
Reading the post, it looks like /u/abcdchop is confusing objective morality with intrinsic morality. Intrinsic morality is indeed "some fake ass shit." Plato was wrong, Augustine was wrong, Kant was wrong; there's no form of the Good, no god to mandate the Good, no noumenal self to determine the Good.
That doesn't mean that our actions can't have value. That's what Rand's morality is: an attempt to discover moral principles with reference only to reality, ignoring the supernatural roots of intrinsisism.
I understand being pissed about society trying to indoctrinate you with a bunch of arbitrary values. I feel the same way. A lot of society's values are crap, but there's a handful that will actually benefit your long-term well-being and happiness. Rand helped me do a much better job of sorting out the good ones from the bad and gave me some new ones. But all of her morality is "You should do this because it will benefit you personally." Here's a book if you're interested.
Hi there. I think it's important to narrow the scope of what you will be studying. I would recommend getting a book that surveys the philosophies of the rationalists and empiricists or to focus upon Kant alone. You won't get to Hegel in the summer regardless of which path you choose.
For Rationalism and Empiricism, I recommend choosing one of two options:
Doing one of these will allow you to understand the works of the rationalist and empiricist traditions pretty well, which will allow you to grapple with Kant much more easily at a later time. You might even be able to sneak in Kant's Prolegomena at the end as well.
Otherwise, I second /u/wokeupabug 's recommendation to go through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with one or two secondary sources. You won't understand the work in its entirety on your first reading (and probably not on your fourth or fifth). Kant is important, but I worry about your foundation in the rationalist and empiricist traditions moreso. You can always study Kant in graduate school, and it seems more fundamental to get the others out of the way first. Either way, however, should be fine.
Best of luck!
Edit: Also, try to do this with a friend who will hold you to a schedule of reading. Discussing these works is really helpful, and take notes while you read!
SUMMARY
>Both Buddhism and Stoicism would appear to recommend the complete elimination of emotional attachment to others. The promise is release from the suffering that arises from loss or anticipated loss of others dear to the self, as emphasized by Buddhism, and tranquility and release from the tumult of wrenching passion as emphasized by Stoicism. Yet it is not so clear what kind of detachment Buddhism and Stoicism recommend. For example, on Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation, Stoicism bids us to extirpate special feeling for others. On Lawrence Becker’s interpretation, Stoicism bids us cultivate resilience, to “encapsulate” special feeling so that the loss of its object has a limited effect on our lives (Becker: 156).
>In this essay, I argue that detachment as resilience is more desirable than detachment as extirpation. The cost of eliminating special feeling for others simply deprives too much value from human life, and arguably deprives life of much of its humanness. We would be better off preserving special feeling while achieving a kind of equilibrium that is not destroyed by loss. It is a challenge, however, to conceive how this is possible. How could one continue to hold others close to one’s heart without making oneself extremely vulnerable to their loss? Can the strong and deep feelings we have for particular others really be encapsulated in the way Becker suggests? I suggest that the Zhuangzi, which also recommends a kind of detachment, has the most promising suggestions as to what attachment conducive to resilience would feel like in a genuinely human life.
David B. Wong is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Trinity College Arts and Sciences Professor of Philosophy in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences
Recent Interview
Some more papers:
Early Confucian Philosophy and the Development of Compassion
Constructing Normative Objectivity in Ethics
Integrating Philosophy with Anthropology in an Approach to Morality
Book you should read:
Natural Moralities: A Defense of Pluralistic Relativism
Review of that book
Did you even try?
https://www.amazon.com/Vice-Virtue-Everyday-Christina-Sommers/dp/1111837546
It is hard to find books that really square this topic, and I'm not sure of your exposure so I'm going to suggest some fun fiction works to start you off.
The Diamond Age is a good book to express some of the computer science concepts.
and
Cryptonomicon is good to understand how some of Turing's ideas were understood.
For actual philosophy ideas I recommend just ordering some heavier works that are harder to get through like
Quintessence
German Idealism
History of Western Philosophy
And (while I hesitate to mention it because I worry about the backlash on /r/philosophy) I think that Philosophy: Who Needs It is important to read if only to argue with people that believe in Ayn Rand's teachings.
I'll leave it at that for now. Most of what I've learned about this have been by reading Wikipedia and random usenet and irc posts. Books that are succinct and good are hard to come by.
You're really not grasping my point. The argument was that parents have no duty to their offspring because the offspring are essentially parasitic. I merely pointed out that the relationship between parents and children is unique because it is the only one where the actions of a person actually cause another person to exist, even if that was not their intent. This is, of course, not my argument, but that of Francis Beckwith http://www.amazon.com/Defending-Life-Against-Abortion-Choice/dp/0521691354
Re: nonconsentual sex, once you accept the notion that unborn children are persons, the only justifiable reason to abort is to protect the life of the mother if it is in imminent danger.
Get on a lifting program , like 5/3/1 and get yourself in shape. Not just for getting girls, but for your health in general.
Pick up, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Art of War, and The 48 laws of Power.
I also suggest The Swordless Samurai.
Also head over tot he personal finances sub and figure out how to start squirreling away a little bit of savings each month as well as budgeting.
Also, learn how to be articulate, and work on your voice. You can probably go down to the theater department at a local college or university to get lessons on the cheap for projection and pronunciation.
No problem, I hope it was helpful. The book I was thinking of is Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity: https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Relativism-Objectivity-Gilbert-Harman/dp/0631192115. Thomson's section at the end has a long focus on what "good" means in a way that would be very helpful here.
Are you looking to read primary sources, or more of a textbook style secondary source/overview?
You could check out the SEP's entries for the most prominent ethical theories:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
As for primary sources, you couldn't go wrong with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a starting point, alongside Mill's Utilitarianism and Kant's Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals.
A fairly good introductory textbook is Mark Timmons' Moral Theory: An Introduction. https://www.amazon.ca/Moral-Theory-Introduction-Mark-Timmons/dp/0742564924
Natural Moralities by David Wong and The Ethical Project by Philip Kitcher are both good.
Hang on, you are biasing yourself by the way you say "pro feminism". These are all pro-feminism if you are talking about equity feminism as opposed to gender feminism. Also, the Factual Feminist gig is specifically aimed at criticizing bad reasoning in gender feminism.
If you are specifically looking for her presenting the value of (equity) feminism, you need to try this google tool I've seen around. You might read her 2013 book Freedom Feminism: Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today. Or her 2003 book Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life (which is more of an ethical topic, but equality of men and women fall into the social morality topic. Or her 2008 speech What's Wrong and What's Right with Contemporary Feminism which covers both good and bad.
In fact, if you want to understand what motivates her, take from that 2008 speech:
> I am not a backlasher, a traitor, anti-woman or a female impersonator. What I am is a philosophy professor with a respect for logic, clear thinking, rules of evidence and –- I hope –- a strong sense
of fairness. In fact, I think it’s my bias toward logic, reason, and fairness that has put me at odds with the feminist establishment.
If you are looking for something scholarly on subject, I recommend Bernard William's book Morality.
Here's a thread I created 4 years ago asking about this topic.
The arguments against Moral relativism are pretty decisive. (There's a difference between subjectivism and relativism, but often people mean the latter during discussion). I recommend looking at this reply here
If you are looking for a clear decisive argument against the theistic view on morality, better off sticking with the Euthyphro dilemma.
>Asking the questions you did means that you don't know philosophy. They were not real questions.
They were certainly real questions, questions very much associated with philosophy. My question was about your standard for evaluating the truth of a philosophy, a question of epistemology. Your first post indicated that the way you evaluate the truth of certain arguments is whether other people, those who are stated experts in philosophy, agree or disagree with them.
I thought this could not be your ultimate standard, so I asked, hoping for a clearer presentation of your view. Instead, I get the answer that either states that the standards of philosophy are readily apparent, or that I am a lost cause for inquiring into your personal metric for evaluating truth.
What I got after that was more examples of appeals to authority and majorities, with no discussion of the content and arguments of Rand's work. What's more, the appeals to authority are false in fact.
> Ayn Rand is not considered a serious scholar by academics, nor by anyone who studies real philosophers like Kant or Sartre.
Allan Gotthelf, who is considered a high-quality thinker and writer on Aristotelian philosophy, has written many books and articles on the topic of Rand and Objectivism in a very positive light.
http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Their-Role-Knowledge-Philosophical/dp/0822944243
http://www.amazon.com/Metaethics-Egoism-Virtue-Normative-Philosophical/dp/0822944006/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Philosopher-Wadsworth/dp/0534576257/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-9
But go ahead, laugh me off.
EDIT: Wrong preposition.
https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Wrong-Applied-Ethicists-Critics/dp/0195337808
This was one of my philo text books for my undergrad. Its well written and does a good job of covering some common issues from both sides. I am sort of sold on it too as I studied under one of the authors.
For metaethics, Andrew Fisher has what I've heard is a good introduction, and Alexander Miller has a more advanced introduction that I like.
For political philosophy, Ian Shapiro's The Moral Foundations of Politics is a great introductory lecture series, and he has an introductory textbook based on the lecture series.
For anthologies, I'd recommend Ethical Theory for normative ethics, Moral Discourse and Practice for metaethics, and What's Wrong? for applied ethics.
I think this one is a nice place to start.
Me la acordaba por este video de Slavoj Žižek: RSA Animate - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. También es el título de uno de sus libros.
The justifications you are interested in have been concealed from you in the following books: They were first presented in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology(1979) and were further expanded in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand(1991).
Many contemporary Philosophers are continuing her work. Including Douglass B. Rassmusen, with his Groundwork for Rights
and Tara Smith with Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.
The fact that you were previously unaware that this information existed does not discredit her Philosophy. That is what we call: The argument from personal incredulity.
> Please define morality, so we can determine which peoples have a common moral foundation and which have in-group behavior that superficially resembles morality.
I won't try to define morality by fiat, but I will offer a "working hypothesis" version of a definition, and if you want to sort it out by dialogue, then maybe we can work towards consensus. So as a starting point, I'd say that morality is a set of principles intended to outline imperatives for conduct. Here I mean imperatives to imply the traditional oughts and ought-nots of moral maxims. I make those secondary to the principles because we do tend to rely on non-imperatives in order to formulate or extend those imperatives -- principles like equality, or justice.
And because I realize that it's likely to be the central bone of contention, I'm putting to one side the argument that morality is, by definition, custom. That's certainly the traditional understanding -- so much so that the Roman philosophers traced it back to their word for "custom." I suspect that it would involve me in a genetic fallacy to insist on that, so I'll just leave it there for discussion at the moment. It does raise interesting questions in relation to a culture that presumably has no history beyond living memory, since oral history is, likewise, a form of custom.
> I hate to think that I'm a part of some weird minority that wouldn't kill because it's fucking wrong, surrounded by a majority who don't only because some law says it's wrong.
You might find Hannah Arendt's essay "Responsibility under Dictatorship" interesting, if not exactly comforting. In it, she tackles the question of how some Germans maintained their moral compass even in the midst of a fascism that basically inverted the moral order. She suggests that given the thoroughness with which German society under Nazi rule devoted itself to the Final Solution, the remarkable fact is not that most people were complicit, but rather that some people were not. I think you would likely agree with her account of why they weren't, even if you're dismayed that they made up the minority. The essay was recently reissued in a volume of her collected ethical writings called Responsibility and Judgment.
No, it doesn't have anything to do with feelings, it has to do with objective flourishing and self-development; their individual teloi rooted in their characteristic activities and particular natures as human beings. Read some Aristotle and some Foot.
1; Very Bad Wizards (Tamlar Sommors): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193478138X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=193478138X&linkCode=as2&tag=verbadwiz-20
2. The Lucifer Effect (Philip Zimbardo): http://www.lucifereffect.com/buy.htm
3. A Mind of Its Own (Cordelia Fine): http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Its-Own-Distorts-ebook/dp/B005GQR074/ref=la_B0034O0AGS_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1369442361&sr=1-2
4. How We Know What Isn't So (Thomas Gilovich): http://www.amazon.com/How-Know-What-Isnt-ebook/dp/B001D1SS2M/ref=la_B000AQ3WKO_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369442448&sr=1-1
Appeal to expertise is fine as long as the expert involved can demonstrate a working familiarity (preferably in Dennett-like fashion ) with the topic/ideas in question. There are a number of experts in the area of philosophy, those with Ph.D.s or professorships, who could do so in Rand's case (those at the Ayn Rand Society, say).
Dare I suggest that you're speaking with great confidence from a position of ignorance.
In epistemology, her idea of measurement-omission as the basis of concept-formation sounds pretty unique. In meta-ethics, her identification of "life" as the ground for "value" might or might not be especially unique, although it was something she was arguing for at a time (mid-century) when hardly anyone else seems to have done so. Rand also had ideas in the area of methodology that - for those (e.g., Sciabarra ) who've inquired into this area with the aid of Peikoff courses - look quite rock-solid.
Anyhow, to do a serious Dennett-caliber commentary on Rand/Objectivism, it's necessary to have a working familiarity with the ideas presented in Peikoff's courses - see Rand's endorsement of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas; given her endorsement it doesn't matter that there are ideas here that are barely elaborated upon in Rand's own writings and it simply won't do to ignore this material if one wants to be a credible commentator. (This doesn't mean, of course, that Rand's own writings can't be assessed on their own merits. But it does mean, of course, what I said above about a Dennett-caliber commentary.)
If cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of a different culture, I think whether it's done well comes down to respect. If you're appropriating another culture with a spirit of genuine interest and respect, I think that's great. We're living in a globalizing world and I think it's great when people expose themselves to different cultures and learn about each other.
If the cultural appropriation comes from a spirit of greed or ridicule and serves to demean and degrade other cultures, then I think that's really just being a douche. Culture is a significant part of a person's identity, and it's just common decency to show others the same respect for human dignity that you expect for yourself. I think the core of the issue then is just respect vs bigotry: how you appropriate another person's culture demonstrates whether you respect or demean them.
I'm not going to bother running through the article. I bet it brings up some good points, but I don't think the "10 things you must know about ___" format is ideal for a subject that has been discussed for decades and written about in books. That article format isn't really made to educate: it's borderline outrage porn that just baits clicks no matter what you think about cultural appropriation. Like, look at all the pages it links to: they link to some good sites, but they frequently link to themselves. And not even to provide sources, they're linking to similar pages like "5 Common Assumptions You Never Realized Were Classist."
Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory (Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies)
The only context outside of SEP and Deathpigeonx where people who seem to know their shit have taken Stirner seriously is Skye Cleary in her book Existentialism and Romantic Love. Your average man on the street, if convinced that subscribing to egoism as self-government (since the narrower view of egoism as an ought to maximize our own welfare would be another spook to Stirner) doesn't render us murdery and rapey lot, would perhaps be quick to question whether our normal relations of friendship and romantic and familial love could survive under egoism and whether their egoistic replacements. I mean, just think about how people admire Hachikō and not because the dog was in hindsight successful at procuring many tasty treats from strangers.
After reading the book I did saw some appeal in Stirner's views. There are indeed many musts and shoulds about romantic love that our culture conditions in us that are better left unfulfilled; there's a reason why psychotherapists talk about musturbation. But then I also feel like the good parts could be appropriated by some quite a bit less radical view that spares some awkwardness and avoids the connection with the persona of Stirner, since he didn't seem exactly like a great lover based on biography.
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rands-Normative-Ethics-Virtuous/dp/0521705460
http://wiki.objectivismonline.net/Virtues
Well one of the must-have criteria for a diagnosis of ASPD is early severe behavioral problems. If you pre-puberty don't have problems severe enough to qualify for a diagnosis of Conduct Disorder, or Oppositional Defiance Disorder, even if you weren't officially diagnosed back then, you can't actually have ASPD as an adult, as it's a prerequisite criterion.
That being said, you obviously can enhance the personality traits you already have. You can desensitize yourself more to gore, practice being dishonest and manipulative, practice being callous and uncaring, etc, etc.
These traits aren't any different from any other personality trait, you can get 'better' at them with practice, just the same as you could practice being more generous, humble, or forgiving, and could get better at that.
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Now, is that ever going to result in you being a full-blown sociopath? Nope, not really. Especially not seeing that sociopathy shows up under brain scan. Our brain literally doesn't function properly in some areas, and does stuff to overcompensate for that by using some tactics neurotypicals don't use at all. You're not going to be able to replicate that, and so you can't really 'become' a sociopath.
But you certainly could become more sociopath-like than you currently are, by practicing some of the attributes you already have leaning in that direction and trying to enhance them in positive ways.
If you're interested in going down that path in a way that might be beneficial for you in your life, I'd recommend starting by reading: 48 Laws of Power. It's a good primer on how to be more deliberately empathy free when planning your interactions with other people.
Yes, I was not familiar with the idea. This is exactly what was said:
> I largely agree with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and so for a time I tried to determine what his position would be on abortion, since he never explicitly wrote on the topic and it wasn't a big issue in the 19th century. I concluded that he would likely be opposed to it, given certain of his claims and the fact that, despite being non-religious himself, he held many positions that would be considered "conservative" today.
>One claim he makes, for example, is that it is wrong to forcibly deny the will of another to live, except in cases of self-defense. A human embryo or fetus naturally wills to live and so it is wrong to destroy it. The abortionist may counter by saying that the word "another" refers to a person, and a human embryo or fetus is not a person. But here Schopenhauer would be able to respond by saying that the will of the human embryo/fetus being aborted is its own distinct Platonic Idea, such that to abort it is to destroy an individual person.
>One upshot to this argument is that it avoids all the debates about whether fetuses can feel pain, are suitably conscious, etc. My argument references not physical but metaphysical harm, as it were. The fetus's will is being harmed when aborted, if not its physical body. Even if one does not buy into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, I have noticed that similar arguments have been made, as in the following book (whose author speaks of the "substance" of a human being instead of Platonic Ideas, though they function much the same):
>https://www.amazon.com/Defending-Life-Against-Abortion-Choice/dp/0521691354/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1496942073&sr=1-4
/u/0762 answered correctly, but you're also correct: Zizek definitely referenced it.
This was the text we used in my Ethical Theory class. It's fairly comprehensive, easy to read, and considerably less expensive than some of the higher-level texts that get suggested in threads like these.
German Idealism, particularly Hegel and Schelling, touches on this. Schelling's later works become too mythological and "out there", even for absolute idealism, but his early works present some amazing ideas on nature being mind and us a part of God realizing itself. These ideas also stem from Spinoza's Ethics in that Spinoza presented the idea that we are finite forms of infinite nature and that nature = God, thus we are all a part of God realizing itself, or natural consciousness gaining knowledge about nature.
In terms of recommended readings, I would mostly recommend secondary literature, German Idealism is exceedingly difficult to jump into. Therefore, I recommend the following:
http://www.amazon.com/German-Idealism-Struggle-Subjectivism-1781-1801/dp/0674027175/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1404678870&sr=8-1&keywords=beiser+german+idealism
http://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Charles-Taylor/dp/0521291992/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404678915&sr=1-1&keywords=taylor+hegel
Also, Pinkard has a book on German Philosophy but it is more general (1760 - 1860) which is still a good read but is unable to go into any great depth.
There is also the Routledge guide to Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit which gives an alright surface reading of the book (explains the historical examples used by Hegel and the basic ideas) but I found that it did not go into the metaphysical arguments as in depth as I would have liked.
This is all off the top of my head so I'll return with more reading options if they come to mind.
However, all's not lost, chum. Check out this book from your local library https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Moralities-Defense-Pluralistic-Relativism/dp/019538329X
VeryBadWizards comes from the title of Tamlers book called "A Very Bad Wizards: Morality Behind The Curtain"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Very-Bad-Wizard-Morality-Curtain/dp/193478138X
PS: David wrote the foreword to it too (I believe)
Moral judgments are usually distinguished by their binary and normative characteristics, so "good" does not necessarily indicate a moral judgment, as "good" does not necessarily indicate a mandate. A good (in a non-moral sense!) test of whether the word "good" is being used in a moral sense is whether it is being parameterized by a condition of interest. If there is no parameterizing interest, and there is no implied objective (like the two times I've marked my own usages of the word "good" in this comment), then it is most likely a general claim and a normative, that is, a moral expression; otherwise, it's still a judgment, but not necessarily a moral judgment. Your reasoning implies that nonmoral judgments do not exist.
The Wiki article on Value Theory has a good (in a non-moral sense!) run up to the necessity of nonmoral judgments and "goods." Bernard Williams' classic Introduction to Ethics serves as both a fair introduction to much of Ethics in general, and as a perspective well-steeped in moral nihilism itself.
A recent book by a friend ....
Existentialism and Romantic Love, Skye Cleary (Amazon).
Educate yourself bigot!
https://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Cultural-Appropriation-James-Young/dp/1444350838/
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!