POL55555: Individualistic Collectivisim

[Trollax]

***This Idea Under Construction***

[Guido Finucci]

It is my mistakenly firm belief the ultimate reality is indescribable; it transcends human language, because of the way we operate. in other words, until we start to think there's no way we can hope to answer the big questions...

Thus there is no way to justify murder, but the word does not carry the connotation of "wrong" with it.

Trollax, your use of the phrases, "in other words" and "Thus..." are misleading. They suggest that what follows can be logically infered from what you wrote immediately before which, in both the quotes above, it  can't (although it's be interesting for you to try and argue that it could).

(In the second case, murder does still have the connotation of being wrong; the killings that aren't wrong, aren't murder.)

In short. Mechanistically, Morality is universal and objective and definition is subjective. Chaotically, Morality is subjective and definition is also subjective. That presents a problem, which brings me to my next point...

You don't say what problem that presents.

I'd have to disagree wth your statements here. It simply doesn't follow that in a mechanistic or deterministic universe, morality is universal and objective.  Most people with deterministic metaphysics will tend to believe that morality is objective (as much as they believe that it exists at all) but even they have their weirdos that rock the boat. In a mechanistic universe, you'd have a hard time making definition subjective though - necessary and sufficient conditions are fairly easy to establish, even if we (as people living in such a universe) could never be sure about whether or not a particular definition applied.

I also think that you have confused morality with law. I tend to think of law being concerned with justice rather than morality - if the law were concern with morality then it is conceptually impossible for there to be bad laws (by definition) and that would definitely not be a feature.

I also think that you have drawn parallels between 'physical' laws (where system states are connected by immutable causal chains) and 'social' laws (where Greyface is blindly following and enforcing rules and regulations) where (IMO) none exist. I think this is a big mistake because it becomes too easy to pretend that social laws are seen as immutable by analogy. For many Greyfaces, this may well be the case but this is us you're talking to.  

Of course, I'm willing to be wrong about all of that.

In keeping with Miller's Law, I think you're basically right though. Would it resonate with what you were saying if I were to say something like, "The chaotic interpretation recognises that there is no rock on which to build a solid foundation and builds a house designed to sit on the shifting sand"?

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

***This Idea Under Construction***

Damn! You said it, brother!
We are all under construction.