I am the subject who experiences these judgments. The universe doesn't give a rat's fart about Botticelli or rape. People care about these things. This does not mean they are unimportant; it means they are important in the only way that it makes sense for them to be important -- to people.
There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. --Hamlet
Easily my favorite Shakespeare quote. Focused a little differently this entry also reminds me of sentence or two from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (I don't have a copy so I can only paraphrase) that went something to the gist of "I don't worry about my interaction with other things despite my inherent subject knowledge of their existence, because they exist in the same way that I do."
Both showcase the ideas that there are things that affect us, and our thoughts that tell us how we can & might affect things. The two are not the same but interplay constantly. For me it reminds me of the bits of David Hume I've studied. He came to a similar conclusion as you - or such was my take away (and I concur with the two of you, assuming my subjective judgement is based on a correct analysis of objective fact) - that every person has his or her own narrative to live in.
To an extent it's backed up by neuroscience, not a direct proof, but the idea that by the nature of our personalities we create narratives that help us apply order to our experiences and arrive at conclusions in order to proceed and build, day after day. And I don't mean that neuroscience has built a proof of this, or even gone looking for this - it's a series of connections I've drawn, my own narrative. But on looking at how vastly a personality can change when physical changes in the brain happen and how a personality seems to be an accident of so many aspects of the brain working in concert.... It's quite amazing, never mind how this means each one-in-a-million personality has a one-in-a-million (and million is clearly too small a number!) outlook on the world.
Err... that was a tangent, but a fun one so I'm leaving it. Um, what I meant was your entry was so Hume-tastic I do hope you've read some of his stuff. The only thing I note is to keep an eye on any solipsistic tendencies. We ought to be able to live by our individual narratives, philosophies, wishes and interests, but we do live in a world with other people. And in so doing, we thrive. I've come to think of our on-going communal emotional growth as moral evolution. We continue to consider our moral responsibilities to each other and elucidate needs we've always had but for one reason (or more like, no reason) regularly failed to see. E.g. we live for ourselves, we learn to live in tribes, we learn how to stratify ourselves so we identify the capable and smart, we learn stratifying also creates a class of unfortunates that the rest of us often end up exploiting, we learn that helping, rather than exploiting, the less fortunate is good, we learn how to help the less fortunate, we learn how to not be dicks about it....
Moral absolutism is the idea that a moral point may be discovered somewhere down the line, however it has always been true. Not following the morality of this revelation has previously been a mistake of ignorance, but now we know better. The subjectivity allowed by relativism says that the xenophobe who was merely a product of his time was otherwise an ok dude who loved his family and took care of his neighbors. He just said terrible things about ________men because so did everyone else. He could even rationalize his prejudice despite how it may have gone against the dictates of his professed religion, again because everyone else in his time and place did. And so which is the code against which we measure the responsibleness of a man's character? Whether it fits with his peers or whether it aligns with his supposed eternal moral commandments?
no subject
Easily my favorite Shakespeare quote. Focused a little differently this entry also reminds me of sentence or two from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (I don't have a copy so I can only paraphrase) that went something to the gist of "I don't worry about my interaction with other things despite my inherent subject knowledge of their existence, because they exist in the same way that I do."
Both showcase the ideas that there are things that affect us, and our thoughts that tell us how we can & might affect things. The two are not the same but interplay constantly. For me it reminds me of the bits of David Hume I've studied. He came to a similar conclusion as you - or such was my take away (and I concur with the two of you, assuming my subjective judgement is based on a correct analysis of objective fact) - that every person has his or her own narrative to live in.
To an extent it's backed up by neuroscience, not a direct proof, but the idea that by the nature of our personalities we create narratives that help us apply order to our experiences and arrive at conclusions in order to proceed and build, day after day. And I don't mean that neuroscience has built a proof of this, or even gone looking for this - it's a series of connections I've drawn, my own narrative. But on looking at how vastly a personality can change when physical changes in the brain happen and how a personality seems to be an accident of so many aspects of the brain working in concert.... It's quite amazing, never mind how this means each one-in-a-million personality has a one-in-a-million (and million is clearly too small a number!) outlook on the world.
Err... that was a tangent, but a fun one so I'm leaving it. Um, what I meant was your entry was so Hume-tastic I do hope you've read some of his stuff. The only thing I note is to keep an eye on any solipsistic tendencies. We ought to be able to live by our individual narratives, philosophies, wishes and interests, but we do live in a world with other people. And in so doing, we thrive. I've come to think of our on-going communal emotional growth as moral evolution. We continue to consider our moral responsibilities to each other and elucidate needs we've always had but for one reason (or more like, no reason) regularly failed to see. E.g. we live for ourselves, we learn to live in tribes, we learn how to stratify ourselves so we identify the capable and smart, we learn stratifying also creates a class of unfortunates that the rest of us often end up exploiting, we learn that helping, rather than exploiting, the less fortunate is good, we learn how to help the less fortunate, we learn how to not be dicks about it....
Moral absolutism is the idea that a moral point may be discovered somewhere down the line, however it has always been true. Not following the morality of this revelation has previously been a mistake of ignorance, but now we know better. The subjectivity allowed by relativism says that the xenophobe who was merely a product of his time was otherwise an ok dude who loved his family and took care of his neighbors. He just said terrible things about ________men because so did everyone else. He could even rationalize his prejudice despite how it may have gone against the dictates of his professed religion, again because everyone else in his time and place did. And so which is the code against which we measure the responsibleness of a man's character? Whether it fits with his peers or whether it aligns with his supposed eternal moral commandments?