tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post4067186559789719556..comments2024-03-28T12:34:14.649-07:00Comments on dangerous idea: Does the law on noncontradiction apply straightforwardly to moral statements? Victor Repperthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10962948073162156902noreply@blogger.comBlogger255125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-54867413031111008452019-05-20T22:40:47.133-07:002019-05-20T22:40:47.133-07:00Let's see who gets email notifications... that...Let's see who gets email notifications... that's the most recent thread I found in my inbox that ended with the topic of abortion. And I just had to come find it to post that <a href="https://pics.astrologymemes.com/this-is-not-a-human-being-if-that-offends-you-31413497.png" rel="nofollow">meme</a>.<br />https://pics.astrologymemes.com/this-is-not-a-human-being-if-that-offends-you-31413497.png<br />Cheers!World of Factshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11066732051794158264noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-2324705736631964942018-11-19T19:06:10.492-07:002018-11-19T19:06:10.492-07:00I think Hacker is criticizing this:
It has been su...I think Hacker is criticizing this:<br /><i>It has been suggested that a human person is constituted by his body. One version of this conception is a more or less self-conscious transformation of Aristotelian hylomorphism (the psuche being the form of the living body).</i><br /><br />When he says this:<br /><i>But the human organism – the individual animal of the species homo sapiens – is the human being. <b>The human<br />being – the human person (of which more in ch. 10)</b> – is not the form of the human body in this sense, he is this organism that has the distinctive powers constitutive of being a person.</i><br /><br />In other words he is criticizing a corruption of Aristotelian hylomorphism and actually asserts that the human being is the human person. I see later that he has a beef with the idea of prime matter, but not the soul as thought of by Aristotle. I'm sure Hacker rejects an immortal soul, but if one can argue that we shouldn't kill persons because they are of a human nature (or psuche) then a person is a living being with a human nature period.<br /><br />Similarly this:<br /><i>That human beings are persons is not a trivial tautology, but a fundamental claim about our moral status and our singularity in the order of nature.</i><br /><br />Seems to affirm that human beings are persons as far as he is concerned.<br /><br />I think the chapter "The Person" has a lot of verbiage relating to the history of the term and especially the legal definition in ancient Greece and Rome. Christianity of course extended the idea that even slaves and infants were persons. Too bad he glosses over that fact.<br /><br />But yes, dividing humans into legal persons and non-persons in the sight of the law allows for all sorts of immoral outcomes.bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-57851903729829625422018-11-19T13:59:50.516-07:002018-11-19T13:59:50.516-07:00What is the point of dividing humanity into 2 part...What is the point of dividing humanity into 2 parts if not to justify treating them differently?SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-75282911557515489712018-11-19T13:18:57.788-07:002018-11-19T13:18:57.788-07:00Yeah, I'm not sure where he agrees with Kant o...Yeah, I'm not sure where he agrees with Kant or not. It seems he likes that he corrected Hume, but Kant failed to do so without adding other errors which he could have avoided by adopting the Aristotle concept of substance. This was in "The Project" chapter.<br /><br />Later as you mention, he does mention Kant's emphasis on personhood, but it's unclear on which points he agrees. <br /><br />The last paragraph indicates to me that he rejects at least the "capabilities" argument and would extend "personhood" to those who did not have an opportunity to exercise the powers of their human nature.<br /><br />Having said all that, I instinctually distrust the method of thinking you will reach truths of existence by examining language and it's usage. You may end up with understanding how people use language, but not why there are people and what we should do with them.bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-30232242905256370112018-11-19T10:10:22.595-07:002018-11-19T10:10:22.595-07:00"To be a person is, among other things, to be...<i>"To be a person is, among other things, to be a subject of moral rights and duties."</i><br /><br />Where do moral duties come from, Mr. Hacker? Who is obligating anyone to do anything?SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-81859996382262041162018-11-19T09:15:16.660-07:002018-11-19T09:15:16.660-07:00Hacker doesn't talk about the unborn explicitl...Hacker doesn't talk about the unborn explicitly, but it's clear he divides divides humanity into two parts. The lower form is the biological human being that has no human personality. A human being is very much like other animals, and as the quote from Kant makes clear, the intrinsic value is ordinary, not special. I don't know if Hacker fully accepts Kant's view or if he disagrees with any part of it. He doesn't really say one way or the other. SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-40448216791882337122018-11-19T09:06:10.844-07:002018-11-19T09:06:10.844-07:00Various Hacker quotes:
While human being is a bio...Various Hacker quotes: <br /><i>While human being is a biological category, person is a<br />moral, legal and social one. To be a person is, among other things, to<br />be a subject of moral rights and duties. It is to be not only an agent,<br />like other animals, but also a moral agent, standing in reciprocal moral<br />relations to others, with a capacity to know and to do good and evil.</i><br /><br />(snip)<br /><br /><i>But the human organism – the individual<br />animal of the species homo sapiens – is the human being. The human<br />being – the human person (of which more in ch. 10) – is not the<br />form of the human body in this sense, he is this organism that has<br />the distinctive powers constitutive of being a person.</i><br /><br />(snip)<br /><br /><i>To be a person is not to<br />be a certain kind of animal, but rather to be an animal of one kind<br />or another with certain kinds of abilities. The nature of a person<br />is rooted in animality, but transformed by possession of intellect and<br />will. So the concept of a person qualifies a substance concept of an<br />animal of such-and-such a kind, earmarking the individual of the<br />relevant kind as possessing (or as being of such a nature as normally<br />possessing) a distinctive range of powers, a personality, and the<br />status of a moral being.</i><br /><br />(snip)<br /><br /><i>That human beings are persons is not a trivial tautology, but a fundamental claim about our moral status and our singularity in the order of nature.<br /><br />(quoting Kant): <br />"a human being is a being of slight importance and shares with the rest<br />of animals, as offspring of the earth, an ordinary value. Although a<br />human being has, in his understanding, something more than they and<br />can set himself ends, even this gives him only an extrinsic value for<br />his usefulness . . . But a human being regarded as a person, a subject of a morally practical reason, is exalted above any price; for as a person he is not to be valued merely as a means to the ends<br />of others, but as an end in himself, that is he possesses a dignity (an<br />absolute inner worth) by which he exacts respect for himself from all<br />other rational beings in the world."<br />(end quote)<br /><br />No philosopher has placed greater emphasis on the ethical character<br />of the concept of a person and on its essential link to the concepts<br />of freedom (hence reason) and responsibility, or had greater<br />influence in allocating such a pivotal role in the characterization of<br />our conceptual scheme to the concept of a person thus conceived.</i><br />SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-31726978175208716522018-11-19T09:04:19.359-07:002018-11-19T09:04:19.359-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-24088217314822318612018-11-19T08:42:37.549-07:002018-11-19T08:42:37.549-07:00Glad to hear he is on the right side of the "...Glad to hear he is on the right side of the "God being a moral monster" question.bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-52767322718621611932018-11-19T08:29:15.952-07:002018-11-19T08:29:15.952-07:00Our pastor is great. It's obvious that I wasn&...Our pastor is great. It's obvious that I wasn't being very clear about what he was doing. He's addressing difficult questions people might have about God and Christianity and giving a reasoned response and a defense. It's really good. <br /><br />I'll come back with some quotes from the Hacker book.SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-60029952524193085252018-11-19T05:57:58.894-07:002018-11-19T05:57:58.894-07:00SteveK,
I could never find where he wrote anythin...SteveK,<br /><br />I could never find where he wrote anything explicitly about the unborn. Maybe you could point me to something.<br /><br />Sorry to hear about your pastor. At least he mentioned the subject of abortion.bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-78962468446011828062018-11-18T20:27:45.619-07:002018-11-18T20:27:45.619-07:00Believe it or not, today's message at church w...Believe it or not, today's message at church was about the abortion issue. Our pastor is doing a series on difficult questions in an attempt to bring some clarity. He did "Is God a moral monster?" a few weeks ago. <br /><br />Yup, we're that kind of church. <br /><br />SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-7965659072688210832018-11-18T20:05:09.411-07:002018-11-18T20:05:09.411-07:00Here are some of my thoughts as I skimmed various ...Here are some of my thoughts as I skimmed various sections of the Hacker book. <br /><br />There is a lot of ink spilled on the page to basically say this: biological human beings (in the womb) don't have any special intrinsic value. They have ordinary intrinsic value, perhaps similar to a biological rat in the womb. They become more valuable intrinsically the more human traits they express. Human persons are the most valuable of all the human beings because they are conscious, can think and create, are moral beings, etc.<br /><br />This view creates problems. Maybe he addresses them and I just didn't read it. One problem is that a human person at birth has the same intrinsic value as a newborn piglet so it's quite easy to justify killing newborns on the basis of intrinsic value. What's so special about a newborn human? Peter Singer thinks they have no special value. So who's correct, Peter Singer or Peter Hacker?SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-62829038145940535322018-11-17T19:07:46.654-07:002018-11-17T19:07:46.654-07:00More thoughts from reading the book:
It looks to ...More thoughts from reading the book:<br /><br />It looks to me like Peter Hacker considers his philosophical commitments to fall under the same category as Aristotle's wrt to the concept of human beings.<br /><br />The 'soul' is not considered a separate substance from the body under this system, so I wonder why someone who agrees with Hacker would think it wrong to say something has a soul?<br /><br />It is completely different from the Cartesian concept of a soul.<br /><br /><br /><i>The Project</i><br /><br />"The Aristotelian tradition, as one might expect of its originator, is inspired primarily by biological reflection. The Aristotelian concept of the psuche (a term commonly translated, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘soul’) is a biological concept, not a psychological, let alone a theological or ethical, one. The psuche is conceived to be the source of the distinctive activities of a living thing – the ‘principle’ of life that makes it the kind of being that it is. The soul, as Aristotle conceived it, is the set of potentialities the exercise of which is characteristic of the organism. Consequently, it is not only human beings that have a psuche, but all living creatures, including plants."<br /><br />"The soul is not an entity attached to the body, but is characterized, in Aristotelian jargon, as the ‘form’ of the living body."<br /><br />"For Wittgenstein did not merely reject one or another of the Cartesian principles and dichotomies. He wiped the board clean of Cartesian doctrines. In an important sense, he unwittingly revived (breathed fresh life into) the Aristotelian tradition. Like Aristotle, he held that such attributes as consciousness, perception, cognition and volition are attributes of the living animal, not of its material parts, such as the brain, let alone<br />of its alleged immaterial parts, such as the mind."<br /><br /><br />Page 27 of the chapter has a chart that shows the philosophical lineage from Aristotle to Wittgenstein.<br /><br />Conceptions of human beings<br />|<br />Aristotelian monism<br />|<br />Christian-Aristotelian<br />monism (Aquinas)<br />|<br />Wittgensteinian<br />monismbmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-63539469638904964492018-11-16T21:07:22.454-07:002018-11-16T21:07:22.454-07:00SteveK,
If you go back and look for my link, you ...SteveK,<br /><br />If you go back and look for my link, you will find a site that has the whole book rather than just segments.bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-86226337734575638572018-11-16T20:54:17.723-07:002018-11-16T20:54:17.723-07:00"My impression of what Hacker thinks is the d...<i>"My impression of what Hacker thinks is the definition of a person is just that it is a particular instantiation of a substantial being. Although all human beings may have the same basic abilities, experiences plus and minus to different degrees they are still human beings-persons.<br />"</i><br /><br />I still don't understand where Hacker grounds human nature. A human person has a human nature according to what reality? SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-9300037250088552072018-11-16T20:23:53.915-07:002018-11-16T20:23:53.915-07:00Hal,
I too have enjoyed the discussion. Thank yo...Hal,<br /><br />I too have enjoyed the discussion. Thank you for the civility and obvious thought-fullness you have put into our exchange. I personally gained significantly from engaging with you.<br /><br />Also, thank you for pointing me to Peter Hacker's book and sharing with me that it was instrumental in changing your POV. I haven't found a lot that I disagree with him on, interpreted correctly of course. :-)<br /><br />I wish we could have continued on to have a dialogue on Hacker's chapter on "The Person" but since we can't I will post my thoughts without expecting a response.<br /><br />My impression of what Hacker thinks is the definition of a person is just that it is a particular instantiation of a substantial being. Although all human beings may have the same basic abilities, experiences plus and minus to different degrees they are still human beings-persons.<br /><br />I think he agrees with Feser regarding humans who lose certain capacities in the final paragraph of the final chapter of his book:<br /><i><br />Deviations from these norms are abnormalities in human life. They may afflict a human being from birth, they may be consequences of accident, and they may be the grim infirmities of senescence. Those thus afflicted are defective, perhaps irreparably damaged, human<br />beings (they may be in a permanent vegetative state, but they are not vegetables). They lack the normal abilities that human persons possess, abilities characteristic of the species (cabbages, by contrast, are not lacking in anything and are not damaged). Our concept of a person is sufficiently complex, multifaceted, and flexible to accommodate such<br />fearful deviations from the norm.</i>bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-18510448382408751482018-11-16T20:17:52.779-07:002018-11-16T20:17:52.779-07:00Then what bmiller said here must be explained.
&q...Then what bmiller said here must be explained.<br /><br /><i>"But if a thing has a certain power associated with it's nature and does not have that power at a certain point in time because it cannot exercise it at that time, then it follows that that the thing has a different nature at that time. But if it has a different nature at that point in time then not only is it a different kind of thing but it must cease to exist altogether and another substantial being must come into existence with the proper nature to exercise that power. This would have to be repeated for each power attributed to it's nature. It sort of empties the idea of things having natures of having any meaning at all."</i><br />SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-62339971535750218562018-11-16T18:48:20.071-07:002018-11-16T18:48:20.071-07:00Hal,
I'm somewhat confused.
I don't cons...Hal,<br /><br />I'm somewhat confused.<br /><br />I don't consider the concept of substance as the *only* factor of whether it is permissible to take a human life or not. I was discussing your argument that it was permissible to take a human life because it could not yet demonstrate certain abilities that were innate.<br /><br />The subject is now "Just War" theory? I don't understand how adult enemy soldiers are equivalent to the unborn. Can they not demonstrate personhood? bmillerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05855545675821692382noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-3685019390416011592018-11-16T18:20:18.550-07:002018-11-16T18:20:18.550-07:00"There are also moral and legal consideration...<i>"There are also moral and legal considerations to take into account."</i><br /><br />We agree the unborn are human beings. What are the moral considerations we should look at? I don't consider your example to be about morality. I consider it to be about the law.SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-33985316012952101602018-11-16T17:16:10.398-07:002018-11-16T17:16:10.398-07:00Answer my question and I'll be happy to answer...Answer my question and I'll be happy to answer yours.SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-23345044258729323652018-11-16T17:00:40.235-07:002018-11-16T17:00:40.235-07:00What did the unborn do to become an enemy like the...What did the unborn do to become an enemy like the Japanese during WWII?SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-18745697898523554262018-11-16T16:18:22.956-07:002018-11-16T16:18:22.956-07:00What did the unborn do to become the enemy?What did the unborn do to become the enemy?SteveKhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00497892283006396471noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-52175104965793258672018-11-16T10:12:45.489-07:002018-11-16T10:12:45.489-07:00bmiller said:
"I understand your argument tha...bmiller said:<br />"I understand your argument that a thing cannot exercise a power that it does not presently have the opportunity to exercise, but that does not mean it cannot exercise the power when it does have the opportunity. Once it reaches it's normal point in development, it will normally have that opportunity."<br /><br />But that's problematic for the pro-life argument that conception is the meaningful starting point for a human being because there's a lot more development AFTER conception than during the few steps of the fertilization process.<br /><br />In other words, the difference between a non-ferilized egg and a fertilized egg is tiny in comparison to a fertilized egg and a fetus. Therefore, the claim that the "nature" of the egg changed so much that it went from worthless to having human rights goes against biological knowledge. Just look at that picture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spermatozoon#/media/File%3ASperm-egg.jpgWorld of Factshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11066732051794158264noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10584495.post-75541378999649866492018-11-16T10:02:21.629-07:002018-11-16T10:02:21.629-07:00Hal,
I don't recall... does rejecting Reducti...Hal,<br /><br />I don't recall... does rejecting Reductive materialism imply that non-physical can and do exist independently of physical substance? World of Factshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11066732051794158264noreply@blogger.com