Shrunk wrote:

OlivierK wrote:Fair enough. (I think. It's still not massively clear, to me at least.)

On the contrary, it is massively clear that the post is deceptive and misrepresents me as saying just the opposite of what I was saying. Inadvertent, most likely, but I'd still like it changed.

Apologies again. I have edited the original post.

epepke wrote:

cavarka9 wrote:what u say is interesting and has its merit but why give space to those who in a position of power will deny it to us?. Its not a charity shop, if they want to be heard, they must give us some space as well. Else we shall only become more and more softer to these likes and soon there is a apologist trade , if its not there to begin with.

Everyone seems to have an idea of what this guy was going to say. Maybe they are right, but I don't know what this guy was going to say or what he'd do or whatever. Maybe he would say what people expect him to say, but then let him say it, and let it be out in the open as an example.

Maybe most people are exactly like stereotypes, or they are morons, or something. Maybe it's only 1% of the time that they say anything surprising or interesting, just to pick a number out of a hat. I don't know. The headlines seem pretty predictable.

What I do know, however, is that the 1% or whatever of the time that people say something surprising and interesting are worth more than the remaining 99% of the time. When people are cut off like this on the basis of something as superficial as the title of the talk, then that 1% doesn't happen.

I've argued previously that honour killings are quintessentially moral acts. They are very bad, of course, but they exist in the moral sphere. The morality is so strong that they override normal human goodness, such as love of family. They are perfect examples of why morality, especially a morality embedded in any culture, is not to be trusted.

Of course, this requires the entirely obvious observation that almost all of morality consists of satisfying a desire to hurt other people in revenge for some perceived transgression, real or imagined. Where one finds the strongest moralities, one also finds the most remarkable abuses of other people. Where there is less stringent morality, people tend to get along a lot better.

That is a dangerous idea. People do not like to fess up to it. It goes against most ivory tower philosophical ideas about morality and ethics, which you will even see people as smart as Dan Dennett taking for granted.

I understand the 1% and 99%. Do let me know about how it is quintessentially moral act?. Would be interested in your reasoning. Do elucidate your idea of how morality and abuse go hand in hand?. Interesting ideas to listen to. Also why do you bring dan dennet here?.Do elucidate your dangerous idea

I'd think that morality and abuse tend to go hand in hand because, for most of recorded history, morality hasn't been about being something egalitarian and permissive in the way most of those present would think of it, but about putting people in their place and being quite brutal to them if they step out of line.

So yes, honour killing is a moral act in that sense, and you can find plenty of similarly abhorrent ideas in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy which many will still claim with a straight face as being the ultimate moral guides.

cavarka9 wrote:I understand the 1% and 99%. Do let me know about how it is quintessentially moral act?. Would be interested in your reasoning.

Sure, but you already know it. When people talk about honor killing (sorry about the US spell checker), whether they are for it or against it, all of the language they use is moral language, and all of it involves moral reasoning.

Nobody ever says, "why did I kill my daughter for having been raped or falling in love with a Christian? Well, there was a study in Nature showing that if you kill your daughter, then there's a 75% chance that it will reduce global warming," or "it stimulates the economy," or "well, I was just bored, and there was no beer left in the fridge." And they certainly can't justify it in evolutionary terms. It's like Douglas Adams' chimpanzee at the dinner table. This never happens.

Instead, it's always an elaborate, contrived string of moral reasoning, starting from God and leading to a daughter riven in twain. It's completely a moral process, as pure as it gets. One has to be almost unbelievably brain-damaged to have a desire to kill one's progeny. OK, some people lose it and abuse their children, but when the kids actually die, then inevitably they flip out. But people who do honor killings often continue to believe that they did the right thing, stalwartly and with steely eyes.

There are very few mental disorders or brain disease that will cause a natural desire to do this sort of thing, and they are extremely rare. Having such conditions has had serious evolutionary costs throughout the entire development of the central nervous system. The genetic lines of people who killed their children a lot simply aren't around any more. Crocodiles did OK because they make so many eggs, but making a new human is costly, and you can't do all that many at once. So you need to preserve what you have, and if you don't, it's genetic bye-bye time.

The only thing that works in anything like a wide scale to get people to perform such acts is morality. You need an extremely powerful morality to get people to kill their children deliberately.

Even with less severe forms, such as beating children, you'll find an awful lot more of this the stronger the local morality is. Christian backwaters in the US, for example, are well known for having more child abuse and incestuous behavior than the relatively libertine and immoral cities. Furthermore, the enclaves within such places also have more.

Take, for instance, the cases of Orthodox Jews in New York City a few years back who attacked young women they thought weren't wearing enough clothes and exposed them to disfiguring reactive chemicals (whether acidic or alkaline doesn't matter). This is insane, and analyzing it in terms of men versus women is also insane.

I'm a man with flagrant heterosexual tendencies, many of whom people consider highly immoral and/or amoral. When I see a scantily clad young woman, I want to fuck her. I want to bend her over the nearest available horizontal surface and put my penis into one of her orifices and wiggle it around until sperm come out the end. You know what? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I say to women I don't know very well, "I'd like to bend you over that pool table right now." It doesn't work out that way, usually, but rather a lot more than moral people would expect, they giggle, and we work something out later.

I freely admit it, here, in an international public forum, under my own name. I am not a moral person at all.

Sure, I might like to slap their butts until they glow bright red or tie up their titties (I specialize in ties that look like Celtic knot work), but always consensually with a safe word system, and the bruises go away. Because of this, not in spite of it, the idea of disfiguring a bare-skinned hottie goes against every one of my admittedly immoral impulses and desires. You just cannot make men want this sort of thing unless, of course, you fill their heads with a really strong morality. Then they'll do anything destructive you like. They'll rape and kill and torture, which comes in handy during wartime (and note all that military talk about decency and honor and moral superiority, which serves the function of turning humans into killing machines).

It's all about morality.

You also know that when people who perform heroic and good acts are interviewed, they almost never use moral language. They always just look at the interviewer funny and say that's just what they do. Or they say they were scared and were going on autopilot. Or they are just reacting in accordance with their training.

Also why do you bring dan dennet here?.Do elucidate your dangerous idea

Because he's quite intelligent but still goes along with the assumption that morality is about promoting well being, which is obviously false, and even the flawed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy doesn't state. I saw a TED talk in which he just blatantly asserted this and built a whole talk about it, which falls down without the obviously false props. Sam Harris does this a lot, but he's a bit of a dingbat and doesn't really have the capacity to think at the level of Dan Dennett. So I don't expect much from him. I do expect something from Dennett, though, and it's really sad to see him make such a boner.

Which explains, partially, why this is a dangerous idea. Because it's completely obvious, and practically all of everyone's experience show it. Take a group of highly moral people, who can recite commandments and moral codes (not that the Stanford Encyclopedia does define morality as always involving a code) and precepts and whatnot and watch their behavior as they are doing morality. You'll observe an awful lot of hurtful behavior. Maybe not so much killing, but shaming, shunning, tsk-tsking and various other forms of social punishment for transgressions that obviously don't matter in any important way.

Now repeat the experiment with a bunch of dope-smoking immorally free love hippies squatting in the mud.

See? It's obvious.

And yet people rebel at this idea, or as in the case of the otherwise extremely intelligent and sane Dan Dennett, are completely unable to perceive, at all, what is right before their eyes. What this says, and this is the really scary bit, is that morality protects itself from being perceived accurately. It is so powerful a mind virus that when it gets into peoples brains, they can't tell that it has happened. Of course, this is why it is such a powerful tool for destruction.

Morality gives its host the perception that whatever they are doing is good. Of course, it might be good. Moral people are capable, sometimes, of being kind to dogs and children. But you don't need morality, a normative or descriptive code to tell you that. All you need is empathy, which comes built into the vast majority of people who don't have Cluster B personality disorders, combined with an ordinary amount of socialization.

Where you need morality is in convincing people to consider bad things good.

That's not the worst of it, though. As Dan Dennett shows, even a mild version of morality can make otherwise highly intelligent individuals utterly incapable of thinking about morality in an accurate fashion. From my experience, 90% of the people reading this won't think about it all. They'll be outraged and sputter, call me names, put me down, and generally claim that I said exactly the opposite of what I said. I know this because it happens repeatedly. And all the time they are behaving in this utterly irrational fashion, they will be absolutely convinced that they are utterly rational and right.

This is what morality does to people's brains.

I hope you don't mind me saying this epepke, but you don't strike me as immoral at all, nor particularly amoral.

Ceding ownership of the word "moral" to people who make the rather questionable decision not to base their moral code on empathy doesn't seem particularly reasonable, nor wise. If you want to (rightly, imho) vent your own moral outrage on such people as you've done above, then just accept that doing so is just as steeped in moral reasoning as anything they come up with.

Matt_B wrote:I'd think that morality and abuse tend to go hand in hand because, for most of recorded history, morality hasn't been about being something egalitarian and permissive in the way most of those present would think of it, but about putting people in their place and being quite brutal to them if they step out of line.

So yes, honour killing is a moral act in that sense, and you can find plenty of similarly abhorrent ideas in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy which many will still claim with a straight face as being the ultimate moral guides.

Oh, yes. That is quite true. It's completely obvious, when one looks at morality, that it is about maintaining a moral hierarchy.

I suppose one could construct a morality that is better and more in line with egalitarian and permissive ideas, but there are a number of problems.

One of the most basic is that it would be, almost tautologically, immoral according to the kind of morality that has been hammered into and has worked its way like a virus into all aspects of culture, everywhere, including everyone. Permissiveness, for example, is inherently and unavoidably against pretty much all existing moralities. Egalitarianism goes against the idea of hierarchies at all, and that includes all moral hierarchies. This makes an egalitarian, permissive morality extremely difficult to construct. Even if you did, it is far from obvious that it could possibly be anything other than equivocation and bullshit.

But there's something more important that it wouldn't address that makes even this seem impossible. Morality makes people stupid. As a mind-virus, it protects itself by causing people not to notice the blindingly obvious. Since the purpose of a morality is to program you to think that something is good (even, or especially if it's bad), then it naturally protects itself by telling you that questioning it is immoral, and therefore bad.

Even if a moral system starts off pretty OK and flexible, it rapidly closes down to protect itself. C.f. Christianity and Buddhism.

Anyway, I'm glad someone asked, because I've constructed a one hour talk that I probably won't have an opportunity to give, because Lake Hypatia seems to have fallen apart and nobody else is really interested in hosting me. Still, I think that I have enough software to splice together some Harris and Denett with some face palm video. I think putting in a bit of the Luck Dragon from Neverending Story would work pretty well, too. But I think I only have 5 free downloads on the video conversion software, so I have to be careful, as I have no money.

OlivierK wrote:I hope you don't mind me saying this epepke, but you don't strike me as immoral at all, nor particularly amoral.

Oh, I'm not amoral at all. I am certainly immoral, as I am directly opposed to morality, that is, that which supports and justifies honor killings.

Ceding ownership of the word "moral" to people who make the rather questionable decision not to base their moral code on empathy doesn't seem particularly reasonable, nor wise.

Unfortunately, anything else is stupid. The problem is that when you don't cede ownership of the word, what you do is run interference for and give power to people who use morality in the traditional sense, that is, to hurt people in order to establish a hierarchy of good and bad.

What it does is hide what people do with it. The minute you start saying, "morality is good, and it isn't reasonable or wise to cede the word," what you do is make it so that every time people hear a moral dictum, they think "gosh, this is morality, so it must be good, because it isn't wise or reasonable to point out it is bad."

This is exactly what makes it possible to use morality to make people bad in the first place.

Now as for "ceding" this, it isn't necessary, as this is how the term is used. Here is the definition of the term from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Now, you might not like Stanford or their encyclopedia, but they're bigger than you and probably have more money, and their encyclopedia has a hell of a lot more influential than either of us.

The term “morality” can be used either

descriptively to refer to some codes of conduct put forward by a society or,
some other group, such as a religion, or
accepted by an individual for her own behavior or
normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.

Now, there's a word in there. Most people don't notice it, probably because morality itself is preventing them. The word is "code."

I'll repeat it. "Code." It's in both the definitions, the one that has it descriptive and the one that has it normative.

So in order to be morality, it cannot be empathy, because empathy isn't a code. That's really simple and obvious. The only way it could be considered a code is if some dude with empathy decided to write what they think down into a code. Which, of course, people do all the time. But if you accept that, then you immediately accept the idea that the dude who wrote it down knows the real deal, and your personal empathy isn't part of this code of morality.

It's quite sneaky, but it's really a bad idea simply to declare that you have any control of the term in the first place, let along construct false ideas of what other people are saying to protect that moral viewpoint.

Now, the Stanford definition is smart in one sense. It doesn't declare specifically that morality must be good or about "well-being." It leaves that open, which is smart, because morality usually isn't about well-being, unless it's about removing it. It does specify that it be a code, and that in the normative sense, it relate to reason somehow. However, this doesn't matter much because people just go ahead and assume it anyway. (I have a great way to demonstrate that using the laws of Florida, but it requires audience participation, so I can't post it here.)

I was excited when Sam Harris' book came out (before I read it, of course). I was hoping that he was going to address the possibility of using science to address morality itself. You know, he shows a lot of pictures of women with burned faces and then talks about science and well being. Well, I think I can save him some futile grant proposals, as follows: You don't need an MRI to figure out whether burning a woman's face with highly reactive chemicals. Unless it's a mild skin peel by a surgeon, the answer is "Yes, it does." You're welcome. Now send me some money so I can have lunch. I want to try out the Mexican place named "La Rockita," which is a weird name because the letter combination means something.

You might, however, learn something by hooking up an MRI to people who are doing morality. That is, try to see how morality is processed in the brain. See if it does have anything to do with reason, or codes. We know some of the brain signatures for these things. We're pretty good at it, and if we aren't, then the whole point of research is to get better.

However, of course, Sam Harris couldn't possibly be arsed about that stuff. It was all just the same hand-waving bullshit. I'm not going to bother to point this out to him, though I could use the money from his challenge, because I have no faith whatsoever that he could even apprehend, let along comprehend, what I have to say. There is no way he could judge a response fairly. So I'm writing here.

And probably the reason this doesn't occur to him is that morality affects his brain in such a way that he is extremely reluctant even to parse the idea, as you seem to be. I love you to pieces, and you are extremely intelligent, but this just demonstrates how morality stupefies. It stupefies really, really big to affect you and Dan Dennett, and me on occasion, though I'm obnoxious enough to have some immunity.

Quite frankly, though, it's pretty obvious why this happens. If we investigated what morality is, we might find that it is different from what it says it is, and that would piss the fuck out of people, because their morality would make them think it's bad. We might, for instance, find that when people are doing morality, the parts of the brain associated with reason or thinking about codes or lists don't "light up," and that would be devastating to ideas of morality that morality itself defends. We might even find that a lot of really old areas light up, areas that we associate with aggression and sex and anger and dominance. That's exactly what I suspect will happen, but it would really piss people off, especially people who make their living writing books talking about how noble and rational and shit morality is.

Still, I can't be sure. What I can be sure of is when they react to statements such as I have made, which in my hypothesis is a result of their morality, they certainly do react with aggression, anger, revulsion, and all the like. I know this happens because it always does in person whenever I say anything in front of a group that challenges their comfortable bullshit, especially skeptics. And all of them, all the time, are desperately convinced that they are 100% rational.

Or just look at the A+ers. It's all monkey, all the time, all dressed up in the language and self-affirmation of reason. Note that I make no value judgments. Because I'm not moral, and I don't have any desire to advertise myself as all rational all the time, I freely admit that I enjoy a little monkey shit, though my preferences tend toward sex and playing Rucka Rucka Ali really loud rather than writing chest-beating blogs. Oh, and a bit of alcohol. I'm making a factual judgment that monkey shit is what it really is. Or reptile, because even actual gorillas don't beat their chests like that (metaphorically, of course).

If you want to (rightly, imho) vent your own moral outrage on such people as you've done above, then just accept that doing so is just as steeped in moral reasoning as anything they come up with.

Oh, no. I won't do that. I'm outraged because of emotional reasons. There isn't any philosophy in it, or moral reasoning. It's purely a visceral reaction, but as I have no desire to try to pretend I'm all rational and shit, I just admit it. It's my gut reaction. But I do think it is natural, that is, evolved into us, because as I pointed out, the genetic lines of people who killed their children have been wiped out.

I know when I'm using reason and when I'm using emotion, and they stay out of each other's way. That's actually because inside my head, emotion and reason get along pretty damn well. Each has their place, and there's mutual respect, and everybody gets along fine. I really worked very hard at this over many years, but it's a lot more fun than pretending I'm Mr. Spock. (Who really wasn't so logical; that's the point. Spock represents that conflict in humans between reason and emotion, civilization and barbarity, blah blah blah, but I digress. Though it is nice to see him finally get some poon, and not every seven years.)

If I wanted to express outrage, I'll do it using death metal or punk, because that's how I (rock and) roll. Usually, I don't give a fuck about outrage, because the only purpose of it is advertising how great you think you are, and I don't care much about that. In fact, if too many people think well of me, I get extremely nervous.

Still, though it's fun, and I like a good catharsis perhaps more than anybody, there isn't a lot of point. Oh, I'm outraged! You're outraged, too! You think I'm right to be outraged! Well, hooka dooka! So fucking what? Big deal. Wow, that was fun. No information was expressed. Yeah, let's do that and only that forever! Or not.

But again, this is what morality does to people, and so QED. You don't understand my motivations at all, but you think you do, and you think I'm just not admitting it and that I'm unwise for doing so. That is the effect of morality in your brain. You are far from stupid, but it is stupefying you and your conclusions, to protect the notion of morality (and moral reasoning) as good in and of itself.

That is, once again, the tendency to want to see morality as good, as a function of morality itself, is causing you to perceive that which is outside your brain in such a way that you make totally inaccurate statements about it. That's a huge problem with morality (or at least I call it a problem). It's much more serious than the fact that most moralities are bad (IMO, of course, because I arrogate to decide what I think is good and bad and not some dude who writes down some sort of stupid code that I'm supposed to follow).

Now, as an addendum, there was a guy named Nietzsche who wrote some stuff. It isn't exactly what I just wrote, but I think that if he weren't dead, we could have a beer together. Well, he could have water, and I could have two beers. I'd probably offer him some Nexium, too. I have a second bottle.

Oeditor wrote:Could be that the organisers, not he, decided what to call the talk.

That's pretty likely. Organizers have a lot of power over this. Even book authors don't have say over what the publication titles are.

Sometimes this works out. Phil Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has a great title. Dick wanted to call it, "'There Are Killers Amongst Us!' Said Rick Deckard to the Special Man." I don't think that's as good a title.

The articles said he agreed with it, but perhaps he was a bit snarky, and he got off on the dangerous way it sounded. In any event, a title is to get an audience, and that's a pretty punchy title. We'll never know, because he didn't get to talk. That's a shame.

Fallible wrote:Yeah, your comments would be beyond everyone else's understanding. That'll be it. Best to just hint at your superior intellect, that will be much more productive.

I prefer flat-out arrogance. There's a point to this, and it's why I'm affecting arrogance here, just as I think maybe the title of the talk that did not happen in the OP was an attempt to piss people off and so get them to come. I'm demonstrating by example.

The reason I'm doing this is that arguing against morality, as I'm doing, has to go against morality itself. So I'm doing this to get it out in the open rather than try to hide it. Arguing against people's beloved morality inherently pisses people off, as I mention in later posts. I can't make it all nicey-nicey and still say what I find it important to say. So I'd rather simply own it. I'm immoral. I'm an arrogant pus. Sure, why not? I'm going to be judged that by a lot of people anyway, so I might as well act it. People who can understand burlesque understand what I'm doing, and people who don't won't understand what I'm saying, so I really don't have anything to lose.

It doesn't always work. For example, it obviously doesn't work. You don't see the meta-issue, and you're just reacting based on the idea that I'm arrogant and therefore morally bad.

However, it is the only thing that ever does work. Maybe 20% of the time, which is pretty damn good compared to how it doesn't work ever if one ignores and doesn't encapsulate the meta-issue. Believe me, I've tried. For more than 20 years. There are simply some subjects that one can't criticize at all without people going ape-shit and jumping to personal judgments. Morality is one. Feminism is another. Conservatism in the US, perhaps not elsewhere is another.

If I'm haughty and arrogant, however, some people will try to look beyond that and see what I'm saying. OK, so you're not one of them, maybe. Have a nice day!

I'm pretty sure that this more careful and direct explanation won't work either, at least not on you. So be it. I can't do any better. So go ahead and judge me, if it's the sort of thing you enjoy. I have no desire to deprive you of any fun.

I won't be judging you, I do not have that right. I am British and not epepke.

epepke wrote:

cavarka9 wrote:I understand the 1% and 99%. Do let me know about how it is quintessentially moral act?. Would be interested in your reasoning.

Sure, but you already know it. When people talk about honor killing (sorry about the US spell checker), whether they are for it or against it, all of the language they use is moral language, and all of it involves moral reasoning.

Nobody ever says, "why did I kill my daughter for having been raped or falling in love with a Christian? Well, there was a study in Nature showing that if you kill your daughter, then there's a 75% chance that it will reduce global warming," or "it stimulates the economy," or "well, I was just bored, and there was no beer left in the fridge." And they certainly can't justify it in evolutionary terms. It's like Douglas Adams' chimpanzee at the dinner table. This never happens.

Instead, it's always an elaborate, contrived string of moral reasoning, starting from God and leading to a daughter riven in twain. It's completely a moral process, as pure as it gets.

'Always'?
From reading explanations mentioned in news stories, I thought much of the 'reasoning was to do with people trying to avoid being judged negatively by their neighbours/village/whatever and/or being under some general social obligation to conform to the primitive code, which seems to be largely worries about other people's judgements.
Family pride and avoiding embarrassment are not in themselves moral arguments for doing something.

A meaningful number also seem to be doing things out of simple rage at not being obeyed by their children, again with little obvious attempt to try and make theological arguments to defend their actions.