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Old channel, but I just started making videos. Here is my first: Rate. Subscribe. Comment. Send money and guns.

You don't like us educated types because you think that we think you're stupid. We don't like you uneducated types because you're stupid. El. Oh. El. I think you may have mischaracterized the 'painfully obvious' remark. You definitely did not realize that you were being paid the compliment of...

Fair comment. I just look at the kinds of things (called 'values') one searches for before one discovers nihilism and the kinds of things (also called 'values') one searches for afterward, and can't bring myself to say that it's just 'a new beginning'. This is mere semantics, I admit, but it...

Well, I should start by saying that, after consulting the Oracle at Wikipedia, that my terminology has been a bit off. Apparently, I'm a moral and existential nihilist: I reject the notion that values have independent existence, and therefore that the value of life (existence) can exist outside...

Good fun! At the risk of coming across like some angsty goth kid, I do assent to metaphysical nihilism. I actually find it infinitely more interesting to contemplate "why I would care" from the standpoint of nihilism than from a metaphysics that says (absurdly) that values are transcendent and...

I'm always a little dismayed by the responses to these kinds of questions in that they inevitably jump to some pretty absurd conclusions. At the outset, it has to be acknowledged that Nihilism is merely a metaphysic, merely a statement about the kinds of things that are. We might perhaps be...

Then, I think you're just advocating for the expansion of research into social psychology and a wider application of psychological principles to human behavior. If we're just talking about the mental health and happiness of the human organism, psychology is the field of study concerned with...

No problem, Weirdtopia. It is a frustrating undertaking. And let me be clear, I do not think that you're a bad guy!

I'm trying to point out the fact that 'morality,' whether objective or subjective, implies something that doesn't even rise to the level of coherence. It implies a 'right' and 'wrong' that depends on something other than the organism and its environment. Put simply, there is only the fact of...

Reiterating the fallacy of composition does not stop it from being a fallacy. Seriously, stop typing.

I never stated nor assumed that you stated that 'we' had a brain. I asserted that a brain or thinking mechanism is necessary for a thing to have something called a 'thought' or 'thinking process'. Because a crowd does not have one brain, it cannot 'think' in a meaningful sense of the word. What...

Please note that we are talking about the very assumptions upon which the wikipedia article that you cited rests. To cite that article in this discussion is to reason circularly. What can be done is to cite the article pertaining to the fallacy of composition, which you have explicitly committed...

There has been a misunderstanding but, for subtle reasons, I think my point still stands. Let me give this another try. Values that are held by more than one person are not shared in a morally meaningful way. Every 'value' is situated in a 'valuer'. This 'valuer' must meet certain criteria. It...

We've hit another equivocation. An 'interest' in the philosophical sense has to be restricted to the actor involved, otherwise we get right back to where we started. For example, one can't have an 'interest', in the moral sense, in a given blonde's desire to have intercourse with one, while one...

Hi, philebus! Can you clarify "The subjects of morality can, I suspect, only meaningfully be subjects of experience - which may or may not mean persons (I'll continue on this assumption)."? My close reading of this seems to indicate that you are saying that moral codes can only be about how we...

I'll wait for your sober response before replying. :lol:

Hey Oz, I think you've inadvertently pointed out a couple of possible ambiguities in my formulation. First, it is not the fact that an agent can arrive at a value that makes him/her a 'valuer' in the moral sense, but rather that the agent has an interest in obtaining that value. I fail to see...

In the following excellent video: Andy Thompson makes a compelling case for the psychological basis of religious belief. I think that many of the points made apply equally well to moral belief. Namely, we're adept at imagining disapproval without the need for imagining a disapprover, even...

The current (?) fad for the discussion of the objectivity or subjectivity of morality has, in my view, stalled based on a lack of agreement of what morality could even be. 1) Is morality authoritative? That is, are we saying that an action is good because one 'ought' to do it solely because a...

You plainly do need one. The authority to act based on a value comes from the autonomy of the valuing agent. This is why, for example, we talk about 'consenting adults' in reference to, among other things, sexual acts. This is why reasonable people recoil at legislating sexual morality as it...