Social convention or majority opinion should not automatically equate to morality which should not be dependent upon
popularity anyway. Now for something to be moral it has to be intrinsically so in the same way that something has to be
objectively true. How accepted it is is completely irrelevant. Unfortunately unlike things that are objectively true there
is no rigorous methodology for determining moral truth. Laws are the legal version of this truth so it has to be defined in
some way otherwise anarchy would prevail. And they are usually passed upon the basis of popularity so as ridiculous as it
is that does seem to be the basis for determining moral truth in society. It should be so much better than that but maybe
this is from a practical perspective as good as it gets sad to say

zoon wrote:
I’m glad you didn’t find anything disastrously wrong with my answer. As you say, science feels more objective than ethics in many ways, less dependent on circumstances, but I think it would be difficult to argue that science is inherently rational while ethics is not. Science is about finding out things which interest us, the motivation is very human. The particular argument which I was using against moral realism, the causal nature of our brains, does apply just as much to science, and this used to worry me, so Spinozasgalt’s question struck a chord. To some extent it still does worry me, total scepticism is somewhat discombobulating, Hume’s recommendation was to change the subject and think about something else, he had a point.

I was interested, and somewhat surprised, that the two Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles which I linked in post #233 on attempts to ground science in rationality (via induction, and scientific objectivity) both came up with a similar suggestion, that science is about plans of action rather than about finding the truth, which is, I think, the line which I’ve been taking for ethics. This may be the answer to scepticism, that our brains did not evolve to discover truths, but to guide action. ???

Scientific researchers tend to follow Hume’s recommendation and not worry about scepticism or ultimate justification. To say that a hypothesis is true is not to make an ultimate claim for it, but rather to distinguish it from a hypothesis which has been found to be false. Similarly, to look for objectivity is not to look for the perfect view from nowhere, but to avoid personal and group biases as far as possible. The language may be that of objective realism, but the practices are mundane and all we need. I should have thought ethics could take a similar line – is that more or less what you were suggesting above and in your latest post #235? Some moral norms do work better than others for managing a society, and if more people accept a moral norm then it’s likely to have a more cohesive effect; this is as much truth and objectivity as we need, and it’s compatible with our being mechanisms. As you say, a few concrete examples would not come amiss. Rambling again, thanks for reading.

At the end of the day, if we have to start somewhere (and we may have to if we are to formulate any sort of moral system at all) I don't think there is a better starting place than the (subjective and arbitrary) 'axiom' that what matters is the wellbeing of humans. Granted there are exceptions, such as for example the wellbeing of the planet and the wellbeing of other animals, but both of these will often coincide with human interests anyway.

So this may be an imperfect starting axiom, but I'm struggling to think of a better one.

The good thing about it is that, absent any plausible or celestial or teleological alternative explanation, it accords with what blind evolution has made us to be, so it would seem perverse to ignore the primacy of it.

Now, after that, I think things get slightly easier, and morality may in fact become amenable to science, in some of the ways outlined by for example Sam Harris, because we have things to measure, test and predict (wellbeing, happiness and/or functionality of society). These may not be as easy to measure as, say, things are in the hard or physical sciences, but that's not unique in sciences outside the hard ones (which are therefore in some ways the easy ones, being free of the capriciousness of human behaviour). Sociology faces similar issues, for example. As does psychology, and politics.

So in a way yes, I am agreeing with you that there is nothing for it than to accept imperfectly pragmatic approaches which 'manage' human interests in what seem like the ways that work best, and to ditch searches for absolutes of truth, fact or objectivity. Though these words could still be used in a relative or approximate sense. Trying to find ways to use them in any other sense seems to be a fool's errand that all humans tend towards (hence for example inventing god perhaps) and perhaps there is too much of this tendency left in philosophy, though I don't think it's just philosophy that it happens in, it can happen in science too if we don't accept what you've been saying about it, that it's a human endeavour, coloured by human interest and pragmatic in essence.

I see that you have been accused of claiming that morality is all social convention and/or popularity. This after being earlier accused of saying that it is all evolution, and before that that it is all the threat of punishment. So many straw men. Because what I like about your analysis is that it says that it is a (complicated and messy) mixture of all of these things and probably others, with evolution being the underlying explanation, but not necessarily impinging directly on everything, because cultural change has outstripped it in many cases, so we have to try to cope with that, by deliberation, reasoning and cogitation and so on. A lot of this will be off the cuff and flawed, not least because some tensions are almost unavoidable, such as the tension between individual and group priorities and the tension between our evolved instincts and our need to deal with situations where our evolved instincts are out of date or out of sync with our best interests in the predicaments we encounter. The other reason it will be flawed is because we are flawed, despite philosophy's ongoing search for the mythical rational being.

So we are a conflicted, flawed species.

I reckon we should pick a good example next. It will undoubtedly get messy, but I don't see a way around that.

surreptitious57 wrote:Social convention or majority opinion should not automatically equate to morality which should not be dependent upon
popularity anyway. Now for something to be moral it has to be intrinsically so in the same way that something has to be
objectively true. How accepted it is is completely irrelevant. Unfortunately unlike things that are objectively true there
is no rigorous methodology for determining moral truth. Laws are the legal version of this truth so it has to be defined in
some way otherwise anarchy would prevail. And they are usually passed upon the basis of popularity so as ridiculous as it
is that does seem to be the basis for determining moral truth in society. It should be so much better than that but maybe
this is from a practical perspective as good as it gets sad to say

I'm tending to agree with pretty much everything you are saying.

zoon wrote:If you are merely threatening me (“Have a care”?!) with unspecified adverse social consequences unless I stop saying morality is largely about threatening people with adverse social consequences, then you are providing a practical demonstration of the evolved behaviour pattern which I am claiming is central to ethics.

No, not really. I thought you might want to say how your theory of ethics works out how I conduct myself. You know, in detail.

zoon wrote:I don’t think there’s a sharp dividing line between ethics and community standards, or rather I would say that “community standards” includes the community’s ethical rules, with no sharp division. In general a violation of an ethical rule (e.g. pushing someone off a footbridge into the path of an oncoming trolley) is likely to involve harm to someone, and to be considered both more serious and more universal than merely violating a local social norm. This distinction is entirely compatible with an evolutionary origin both for ethics and for setting up community standards which are not felt to be strongly ethical in character. There is much evidence that we are wired up with a predisposition to object when harm is caused to another person, while local norms are learned later. Again, the distinction is not a sharp one, the content of an individual's ethical system is also heavily shaped by their learning. I fully expect that you have some ethical standards which are not shared by the people around you, this is to be expected in a very large society with many subgroups, while it is probably less common in small-scale societies such as the hunter-gatherer groups in which we evolved.

Of course you don't think there's a dividing line. All you're trying to do is find a moral prescription to compete with the ethical absolutes of theism. You think there's a dividing line between absolutes and community standards, and we don't have to argue about that. I just wondered if you had any prescriptions for my conduct. We're not hunter-gatherer groups any more, and your references to the ethical standards of hunter-gatherer groups are irrelevant unless you have some ethical prescriptions based on what you think those standards are. Just fucking say what they are and see how much like the theist prescriptions they are.

I have precisely zero problem with trying to establish some fundamental axioms or first principles pertaining to morality
None whatsoever. What I object to is the notion that there are such things as moral facts and moral realism or objective
morality. Those concepts most definitely do not exist. Morality has its origins in evolutionary biology and psychology and
operates upon the principle of what is good for the group as a whole but one cannot apply a universally objective metric
to any group no matter how small it may be. And extrapolating that to nation states or global society is simply ridiculous
This is not how human beings function. And so labelling morality as anything objective is flawed from the very start. The
aim should then be to strive for objectivity much as possible while at the same time accepting it is impossible to achieve

surreptitious57 wrote:IWhat I object to is the notion that there are such things as moral facts and moral realism or objective morality.

That's fair enough, but all you're objecting to is the way people talk about ethics in those terms. I'm far from specifying absolute ethical principles. What I am doing is asking what you're going to do to justify an "act of conscience", like refusing to register for a military draft, or some other situation where you might be compelled to undertake military service when your society makes that a law. Forgive me if you've never had that sort of experience; in that case, use your imagination.

It could be as simple as saying "I don't feel like risking my life to serve the (xxx) interests of my society." Or, "I'm so scared, I'm shitting my drawers." If you think it's only ethical if it applies to everybody, then you might be a communist. Or a bumblebee.

Where there is a conflict between an individual conscience and the law that will be resolved depending upon a couple
of factors. How strong the objection to the particular legal requirement is. How prepared one is to accept punishment
for refusing to comply with it. Now there is no universal answer to this. It is entirely arbitrary as human beings are not
machines. And so behaviour cannot be predicted with total accuracy. Although those with common psychological traits
may be more inclined to favour one option over another

I might add that conscientious objection is only a viable option if it can be afforded by the societies which implement it.

As far as I'm aware, it was mainly brought in post-WW2 in certain countries along with other post-global conflict laws about democracy and human rights in general. My guess is that it seemed like a noble idea in the minds of those sick of senseless war.

It might even have been seen as one (democratic) way to avoid societies falling prey to the selfish dictats of a military-industrial elite intent on starting wars for reasons other than what is/was in the interest of the general populace. I think Eisenhower said something about this.

zoon wrote:At the same time, I’m beginning to think that when they stress personal autonomy, both Cito di Pense and Spinozasgalt are perhaps making a more fundamental point, that ethics would become irrelevant, effectively impossible, if we fully understood each other as the mechanisms we are. If one feature of ethics is taken to be community sanctions for individual behaviour, then the individual does at any time have the choice whether to break the rule and risk the sanctions, or not. This would not be the case if errant brains were being fixed like faulty cars, we could lose the sense of personal individuality and autonomy. I think that more fundamental kind of personal autonomy is likely to be lost if neuroscience does eventually manage to understand brains in detail, ethical thinking depends on our ignorance. Perhaps ethics is indeed incompatible with our being causal mechanisms, if we understood the mechanisms?

That is thought-provoking.

And sort of a conundrum, possibly all the more so for the Realist, since (it seems) it is their goal, to find this perfect, objective standard, and what's more, apply it (or why else even want to know what it is?). Which, as you say, would hypothetically result in......what?......a kind of perfect society perhaps, with no further need for moral uncertainty, because there would be no disagreement?

A theist might say this isn't what any god would intend, that he had to give us free will in order to......hard to say what, really. Judge us, I suppose, against the standards he presumably could have instilled in us if he'd wanted to. I suspect that he might have made himself redundant then, post-creation.

archibald wrote:
And sort of a conundrum, possibly all the more so for the Realist, since (it seems) it is their goal, to find this perfect, objective standard, and what's more, apply it (or why else even want to know what it is?).

I could ask you to cite the reference for that conclusion the way zoon cites the research of evolutionary psychologists. Otherwise, I can find people spouting this style of philosophy on daytime television interviews with Dr. Phil.

Cito di Pense wrote:I could ask you to cite the reference for that conclusion the way zoon cites the research of evolutionary psychologists.

It's in the definition of Moral Realism I posted.

Cito di Pense wrote: I can find people spouting this style of philosophy on daytime television interviews with Dr. Phil.

Indeed. And I can imagine you, sitting there, hunched over your tv dinner, shouting at the television, little flecks of peas and carrots spraying out onto the carpet. They can't hear you, you know, in the studio. Or do you punch the numbers on your phone with your little gravy-stained fingers until you can whinge at them on air?

They probably have as little reason to take your popcorn from the gallery efforts seriously as anyone here does.

surreptitious57 wrote:Evolution disproves moral realism because we not only evolve physically but also morally. That means there can not be
absolute moral facts because if there were they would not be subject to change over time. But it is fallacious to apply
contemporary moral norms to any historical event. So were moral realism a valid concept that would not be a problem

A moral realist (a soft one, only making modest claims) might say that all that, all the changes and variations, are just people not being able to read the moral compass right, in any given situation (because I'm thinking that a modest realist will admit that there is no one absolute moral fact about anything, but rather a fact that is appropriate to each circumstance).

I think there might be some mileage in this, because....well, people might not always know or do or think what's best for them.

But it's about objectivity and facts in a very limited sense. It's more about 'best' or 'maximal' than 'truth' per se or in any other sense.

Even a hard Moral Realist who believes in absolute, objective and external rights and wrongs could say that it's still just our inability to read the compass properly. But that's a higher bar. And getting up towards woo, imo, involving unjustified beliefs and faith and so on.

Cito di Pense wrote:

surreptitious57 wrote:IWhat I object to is the notion that there are such things as moral facts and moral realism or objective morality.

That's fair enough, but all you're objecting to is the way people talk about ethics in those terms. I'm far from specifying absolute ethical principles. What I am doing is asking what you're going to do to justify an "act of conscience", like refusing to register for a military draft, or some other situation where you might be compelled to undertake military service when your society makes that a law. Forgive me if you've never had that sort of experience; in that case, use your imagination.

It could be as simple as saying "I don't feel like risking my life to serve the (xxx) interests of my society." Or, "I'm so scared, I'm shitting my drawers." If you think it's only ethical if it applies to everybody, then you might be a communist. Or a bumblebee.

I think you would be most likely to identify your resistance to a community moral rule as itself ethical if you belonged to a subgroup. For example, someone with a Quaker background might refuse to fight as a matter of principle, even if they were not themselves a theist. If you did not have any such community background, then you might be more likely to identify your impulse as mere individual resistance, or even perhaps as wrongdoing. For example, in the book "Huckleberry Finn", Huck Finn helps a slave to escape, and his conscience bothers him because he is conniving in theft. Mark Twain, the author, was I think an opponent of slavery, and regarded his character's motive, to help a fellow human in trouble, as essentially moral, though ironically not recognised as such by Huck Finn.

Cito di Pense wrote:I could ask you to cite the reference for that conclusion the way zoon cites the research of evolutionary psychologists. Otherwise, I can find people spouting this style of philosophy on daytime television interviews with Dr. Phil.

How about.....there you are, on the phone to Dr Phil and giving it this and that about not morally justifying this or that...and all of a sudden, a bad mans comes up (you're in the street, I forgot to say) and bops you mightily on the head with a baseball bat and grabs your wallet and runs off. As it happens, I, Police Constable Archibald, am in the vicinity and quickly on the scene after hearing your anguished cries. You briefly tell me what happened and point in the direction of the fleeing wrongdoer. And I say to you, 'Wrongdoer, mr cito? Could I ask you to cite a reference or otherwise justify that conclusion?' Because it's your lucky day, and I'm from SPURT, the Special Philosophy Unit Response Team, and just the man to chat to about these important matters.

The arrangement of atoms in that man with the baseball bat was just wrong?

I understand the vernacular and may even use it myself ... but I would hope the emergency response team from the philosophy police would not to conflate the underlying reality with the vernacular.

Anyway, here's my take: evolution in us has formed a bunch of emotions like fear, guilt, shame, pride etc. Society and individuals, fill in the appropriate moments when to express or perhaps even feel these emotions. OK some emotions and when to feel them might be innate from an evolutionary perspective.

I don't think it does any harm to remember that the concepts of evolution, morality, ethics, society, emotions, and an individual all have their underpinnings in chemistry/physics etc.

So whatever conclusion we might come to regarding justice being a universal principle ideally would be coherent with the fundamental forces that form our beliefs.

zoon wrote:OK, I don’t think I want to press that point, I will certainly agree that ethics is a multifaceted affair. I would still say that collective social sanctions are one important aspect of ethics, but there are others such as a sense of justice and equity. The point I want to establish is that none of the behaviour patterns which are characteristic of moral behaviour are incompatible in principle with an evolutionary origin, and I am also showing where I can that there is direct scientific evidence of various kinds that they do have such an origin (the indirect evidence being all the evidence that we have evolved).

Good for me, at least, as it looks like I wasn't debating a strawman. Look, I think social sanctions play a part in the practical upkeep of societies and so forth (that's what legal systems are trying for, I guess), but I'm not willing to say a whole lot more than that without a lot of good argumentation and/or evidence. What I'm trying to caution against is jumping into the explanatory details of your account and looking more and more for broad explanations without checking and being clear on what you're trying to account for. Remember when we started pages ago, this was about providing a descriptive account or explanation of our ordinary moral practices (and possibly reforming them to fit with it). But who knows what these are now? And who knows if that's what we're still doing? It seems like we've got a lot of confusing shifts from justifying particular moral judgments, explaining general dispositions and phenomena, and moving in and out of different parts of ethics, without a sense of what's supposed to fit where or who, if anyone, your competitor is. We haven't looked in any detail at our moral language, or motivation, or how moral judgments work, barely any of it. Obviously I don't have the time to actually do that with you these days, but these are things I'm suggesting you might want to look at. You might do a good survey of metaethicists and see what these people are doing and how they break down your general points into details and try to clarify them. If you want a list of such people, instead of the general back and forth here, I'm happy to put one together. The realism I was talking about is a metaethical view, after all. It's about what sort of things morals are, not about which particular moral judgments are justified and so on. Its motivation (whatever it has) comes from its explanatory virtues. Same as it does for relativists, non-cognitivists, constructivists and so on.

zoon wrote:

Spinozasgalt wrote:

zoon wrote:My primary reason for not accepting moral realism is the scientific evidence that our brains, along with the rest of our bodies, are mechanisms which evolved through natural selection. Brains did not evolve to seek ultimate Truth, but to control the body of the individual in such a way as to improve the chances of survival for that individual’s genes. If a moral realist challenges this account of the origins of our brains, there are thousands of relevant scientific papers presenting the empirical evidence, Calilasseia has linked to many of the clearer examples. There is no evidence that the least detail in the apparent design of our brains is there for any other reason. As a moral realist, you are claiming that something other than evolution is guiding not just the basic structure of our logic, but also the specific content of moral norms. My contention is that there is no such other source of guidance, and that moral realism is therefore dead in the water. For anyone who accepts evolution as a fact, it can indeed be assumed against the moral realist that our moral views are saturated with evolutionary influences. If a moral realist claims otherwise, there is a need to explain why: what is this supposed source of guidance which is, or should be, overriding our evolved brain mechanisms?

I think you're making a mistake in construing realists as "rationalists" and giving them this sort of moral certitude. The only reason to call them "rationalists" in this sort of discussion is that they're arguing for something like that autonomy assumption. And the point the realist wants to make is just that we agree with something like this assumption in any number of other areas, so if we're just going to chuck it out we'd best have some reason to do so. Similarly with talk about "ultimate Truth" and "Reason". It creates a false aura, when realists can be just as modest about their claims as these critics.

Now, looking at your last paragraph, it's interesting but again the realist can suggest that if you're proven anything then you've proven too much. If this lack of guidance in our evolutionary past undermines the autonomy assumption in ethics, why shouldn't it also do so in other domains? Why shouldn't it do so in science and undermine our confidence in evolution, too? The realist can say that if truth is a thing, our evolutionary past needn't have involved guidance towards truth in order for us to track such a thing now. If anything about us evolved to do one thing (if we can put it in that language), it doesn't mean that we're not now using it to do something else. So, as the author of the Stanford piece says, the moral debunker will have to look for something else more domain-specific in order to undermine the realist.

This is all really quick and rough because I'm short on time, so hopefully people can read it charitably.

You are taking the perspective of a moral realist, and I am guessing (possibly incorrectly) that the heart of your argument is in your question above (which I think is a central one):

If this lack of guidance in our evolutionary past undermines the autonomy assumption in ethics, why shouldn't it also do so in other domains? Why shouldn't it do so in science and undermine our confidence in evolution, too?

You are saying that if the evolutionary theorist calls into question the autonomy and objectivity of ethics because of our evolved and causal nature, then evolution itself, as a result of scientific inquiry, is also called into question. The moral realist is claiming that to accept the scientific view of brains is to invalidate the objectivity of science.

My answer, from the standpoint of an evolutionary theorist, is that science itself already cheerfully calls all its results into question. They are all provisional in that they are based on empirical evidence, and new empirical evidence might always overturn any scientific model. We don’t know for certain beforehand what the next piece of evidence will turn out to be.

......

If the moral realist claims that there is some objective standard for ethics to which we have access, then they are making a far stronger claim for ethics than has yet been substantiated for science.

I cut out a chunk of the philosophy links there, because they tilt into epistemology issues rather than what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about objectivity and how we know. The realist (or just the metaethicist) can be as tentative and provisional as you like, and they often are. And it's not about rejecting the scientific picture, but rather a conclusion that you draw from it.

Remember what the autonomy assumption is as it appears in Stanford:

Autonomy Assumption: people have, to greater or lesser degrees, a capacity for reasoning that follows autonomous standards appropriate to the subjects in question, rather than in slavish service to evolutionarily given instincts merely filtered through cultural forms or applied in novel environments. Such reflection, reasoning, judgment and resulting behavior seem to be autonomous in the sense that they involve exercises of thought that are not themselves significantly shaped by specific evolutionarily given tendencies, but instead follow independent norms appropriate to the pursuits in question (Nagel 1979).

(If you look at the stuff surrounding this assumption in the article, you get the necessary caveats so that we know we're not talking about some ultimate rational God-type agency thing completely cut off from evolution, either, so we can dispense with that idea. I would put it differently to Nagel, too, but you get the point of it.)

Now, if something like this assumption is at work in other domains, how do you assume against it in one without doing so in others, based on the argumentative picture you've sketched above in your original quote?

From where I'm sitting, it looks exactly like you are arguing against straw men the whole time, because I don't see where zoon or anyone else assumes against the sort of reasoning entailed in the autonomy you're talking about. It's already been acknowledged, including by zoon, as being part of the mix (for example when she said, a few posts ago, that people can choose to go against, for example, moral codes).

In what proportions this is part of the mix is up for grabs, and you may think that zoon has too little of it in her mix, but that's another matter, concerning degree, and even old Naglers has wisely covered almost all his bases by only opining that it operates (is assumed to operate at least) to a 'greater or lesser degree' and cleverly throwing in that it's 'not significantly shaped' by evolutionary tendencies. That's all so wishy-washy that I reckon it would be possible to take an even stronger evolutionary line than zoon and still not fall foul of it.

I say almost, because he could also have done with prefacing 'people' with the word 'many' or 'most', imo, but no matter.

Furthermore, zoon has already answered your last question anyway, in that she's not assuming for it in other domains either (even though she arguably has good reason to, by dint of the regularities often encountered by science but not often in morality). Which makes your repeating the question doubly confusing.

Also, I hope zoon has more free time over the next few months to do a survey of metaethicists than I'm going to have. Personally, I take part in these chit-chats to give and take pennysworths with other people, not be hand-waved away to surveying 'current trends in metaethicism' by someone who has yet to front up with anything resembling an illustrative example of what he's been banging on about.

If you haven't got your own, you could borrow one from one of the metaethical realists.

archibald wrote:From where I'm sitting, it looks exactly like you are arguing against straw men the whole time, because I don't see where zoon or anyone else assumes against the sort of reasoning entailed in the autonomy you're talking about. It's already been acknowledged, including by zoon, as being part of the mix (for example when she said, a few posts ago, that people can choose to go against, for example, moral codes).

In what proportions this is part of the mix is up for grabs, and you may think that zoon has too little of it in her mix, but that's another matter, concerning degree, and even old Naglers has wisely covered almost all his bases by only opining that it operates (is assumed to operate at least) to a 'greater or lesser degree' and cleverly throwing in that it's 'not significantly shaped' by evolutionary tendencies.

I say almost, because he could also have done with prefacing 'people' with the word 'many' or 'most', imo, but no matter.

Furthermore, zoon has already answered your last question anyway, in that she's not assuming for it in other domains either. Which makes your repeating the question doubly confusing.

Also, I hope zoon has more free time over the next few months doing a survey of metaethicists than I'm going to have. Personally, I take part in these chit-chats to give and take pennysworths with other people, not be hand-waved away to surveying 'current trends in metaethicism' by someone who has yet to front up with anything resembling an illustrative example of what he's been banging on about.

If you haven't got your own, you could borrow one from one of the metaethicists.

Spinozasgalt is asking (as a metaethicist, at least) what moral judgements are, as in, are they merely serving suggestions for social interactions? I don't think the pseudo-arguments against, for example, moral realism are even slam-dunk arguments that ethical judgements are the juice that maintains social order. The baseball bat example suggests that the objective of (at least some of) what you would be calling ethical judgements is aimed only at redress. I'm used to hearing theists argue that without moral standards, society would collapse into chaos, but that's not the argument for the function of social sanctions being made by non-theist ethical 'thinkers' as exemplified by those who are trying not to take ethical realism seriously here. Locking somebody up for armed robbery is a legal matter and it sounds like you're about to suggest that the ethical part of it is the latitude in sentencing. The metaehicist still is asking, what is the function of that latitude? You can think about this, or just keep banging on about how everyone is banging on about something nebulous. I guess you could try talking about how, for example, redress helps to maintain social order, see how it stacks up against what the theists are saying.

Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.

-- Pretty Boy Floyd, by Woody Guthrie

Well, I suppose that's interesting, as an example of attempted mind-reading perhaps. But it's not telling me what you'd say to PC Archibald, is it?

As such, it sounds like a lame diversion from the apparent fact that you don't like answering your own questions. So why should anybody else bother to try to do it for you, only to find that you put words in their mouth? To wit: no one mentioned redress, except you. No one mentioned anything about morality. PC Archibald is just listening and waiting.....

Cito di Pense wrote:Spinozasgalt is asking....

Oh I get that bit. And I get the endless not being convinced and never putting one's own neck on the block, not to mention the lack of plain speaking or ever getting out of the starting blocks. That's how I know he's doing philosophy and not something that might be more....useful and productive.