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Alison R Noyes's avatar

"It illustrates the reasoning error called a 'Category Mistake', committed when something from one epistemic class of things is deployed to help establish a proposition from another class."

Indeed and see Thomas Szasz who states in the Myth of Mental Illness that the concept of "mental illness" is a "logical category error". One cannot have an illness of an abstract concept, the mind - cf brain disease which is disease of the physical organ, the brain.

Re "God," it depends what one means. How about "the mysterious source of everything which can sometimes sense" (attrib. Einstein)?

Isn't there some danger in your argument against "sides" that one might end up not believing in anything? Surely it's better to know, subject to change, where one is but at the same time acknowledge others' points of view.

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Andrew Wurzer's avatar

This piece is brilliant and manages to almost entirely capture my thinking on the idea of morality and describe it better than I could.

To me, there's always been a simple core to my views on morality: if you want a universal, objective morality, that can only come from outside of ourselves, because we are individuals and do not all share the same feelings under the same circumstances; we are subjective. Identifying anything outside of ourselves as universal morality simply introduces our subjective identification of those values, making the external, internal again. People posit god as the escape from this, but since our identification of god (a thing we only posit abstractly) is again, itself a subjective act.

So. We can't be objective within ourselves (our very "self" is not objective). Every attempt to understand the things outside ourselves is tainted by the mediation of our subjective interpretations, even "god". What do we do?

We bring in faith, which functions as a way of saying "in this special situation, I can get outside myself and my subjective interpretations and see Truth." While I suspect this is self-delusion, and I get somewhat annoyed that people have the arrogance to believe that they can do this, I only really object to it when they try to impose it on others.

In any case, this has always led me back to the idea that morality is simply your own internal feelings dressed up in several layers of abstraction. And I don't devalue the abstraction! Ethics and moral philosophies are very helpful in getting us to understand how we *feel* about things. I look at utilitarianism or deontological ethics as tools, and these tools can help us better understand our feelings and better explain them to others. But it's never occurred to me that they were actual moral prescriptions unto themselves. Any time your ethical system is at odds with your internal feelings, the problem is most likely with your ethical system. (Ethical systems can sometimes help us work out conflicting or incoherent feelings, but I don't actually think this is necessary; sometimes we're simply not coherent.)

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