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RE: The Origin of Human Values:

in #politics5 years ago

Any attempt to derive normative claims (i.e. claims of what is moral) from descriptive ones (i.e. claims of what things are) are troublesome; the is/ought distinction. Here's a quote (from that link):

According to the dominant twentieth-century interpretation, Hume says here that no ought-judgment may be correctly inferred from a set of premises expressed only in terms of ‘is,’ and the vulgar systems of morality commit this logical fallacy. This is usually thought to mean something much more general: that no ethical or indeed evaluative conclusion whatsoever may be validly inferred from any set of purely factual premises.

In this sense, I disagree because you derive normative statements from "human nature".


In another sense, I disagree with you from an existentialist point of view. Without going into significant detail, the core principle of existentialism is that "existence precedes essence"; i.e., what something is comes after something existing (especially of humans). Hence, the following statements by you are one's I'd contest on these grounds:

More specifically ethics is the study of Theory of Man and as such is predicated on the Natural Laws of Human Nature.

This one is because no such thing as human nature exists. At most one can say there are shared, socialised elements of humans but this is less so a nature than it is a social construction. Furthermore, this ties into the earlier issue regarding the is/ought distinction. I won't bother quoting them, but all normative conclusions based on "human nature" I'd contest.

All humans are born into the world with certain natural proclivities or core passions.

Again, I disagree--instead, these are socialised and gained from birth but not at birth. That being said, it is possible that I'm being pedantic here and you agree with me, unless you believe in some ideal essence (ideal in the sense that it's not material) of people like a soul--something we'd obviously disagree with.

All of the greatest potentials for Beauty, Brilliance and Accomplishment are also intrinsic aspects of human nature.

This one is pretty obvious--if I don't believe in an intrinsic, at least non-social human nature then I'd contest any statement of intrinsic human nature.


And then there's my criticism that's more dialectical. I would argue that instead of having multiple values that act separately to determine human behaviour, one has a value-system. At birth there is an empty value-system (in line with existentialism) then as one is socialised, the new (contradictory) value is incorporated into the value-system via sublation, or aufheben, in the dialectical method (well, it's a new value-system in terms of content but in terms of functional scope it's the same). Alternatively, the negative (the value) is completely denied (which is sometimes possible) and no dialectical process takes place.

Note here that I use contradictory less so that the values contradict each other but more so that multiple distinct values cannot at the same time determine behaviour and must therefore be in some way part of the same intersectional system. I plan on writing a more in-depth overview of this dialectical intersectionality in a post, but I haven't yet developed it to a stage that I'm happy with it (although at this level I'm fine with it).


I hope this helped--if you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

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The mere potential for any life to exist, from the most basic single celled organism to the most complex sentient, necessarily precedes any manifest physical existence and survives postmortem. As Stephen Hawking put it so well, information cannot be destroyed.

On that basis alone I would have to reject existentialism and it's mantra of 'existence precedes essence'. That potential is most certainly a characteristic of essence. Furthermore I do not believe any argument can demonstrate that such potential does not precede existence. Any such argument would have to demonstrate that potential did not exist prior to the big bang, which is when physical existence as we know it came into being.

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