Along with the bad, annoying and hypocritical stuff in FDR and Stef there is also a lot of good, inspiring and useful and potentially life-changing stuff. The difficult part is to seperate the good from the bad and this way possibly create a 'new and improved' version of Stef's ideas (and the people he got most of his ideas from).

A first step may be to do a close reading of his book 'On Truth: the tyranny of illusion', and that is what this thread will be devoted to. I will try to give a very brief summary of each of the subsections (though I am not guaranteeing that I will complete the whole book or when i do complete it to do it in a short time. i will post whenever I feel like writing about it) and discuss some points and hopefully this way others will join the discussion so that we can critically examine the ideas and pick out the good and discard the bad.

That sounds awesome what are your initial impressions of the book so far?

summary:

Stef distinguishes between 3 types of relationships:

1. the first kind is joyous, mutually beneficial, deep, meaningful, fun, a pleasure to have. it is also very rare

2. the second kind is voluntary (and hence) mutually beneficial but not typically joyous, deep or meaningful. Like relationships you have with your grocer, baker or boss. they're easy to break off, without guilt.

3. the third kind tortures us very often and undermines joy, integrity and independence. It consists of 3 components:

a) not entered into voluntarily.
b) involves unchosen obligations
c) are said to be moral

You are born into these relationships. (family, religion, country etc.) But for the rest of your life people will tell you that you are responsible for them and that it creates obligations.
Your parents did enter into a contract when they decided to have you, they should assume physical(food, clothing, shelter) and moral responsiblity (which is about integrity: consistenrcy between reality (not telling your kid that father is sick when he is drunk), ideas (telling children what is right and wrong while yourself not knowing it or why) and behaviour (follows I think from the earlier two. stef doesnt discuss this one further).)

because parents esp. since the fall of religion really have no idea what is right and wrong and cannot in any case explain why this is so, when their children ask, they cannot answer them but have to bully and intimidate them or tell fairy tales.

this is especially done bacuse of the corrosuive influence of culture: if everybody around you tells their children lies, then the costs for you of telling them the truth is very high: you will be shunned, ridiculed and so on. so we lie to our children while telling them that lying is bad

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comments:

Stef thus distinguishes between 3 types of relationships, but although this is a useful distinction i think it is surely possible that some relationships are mixes of two or three, and so absolutizing the distinctions seems uncalled for. when done it can lead to cutting off certain people while there in fact is a lot of joy and depth or whatever to be had, as long as you dont expect them to become ]morality kings' or anything. You just learn and try to understand them so that you can anticipate their failings, not be too discouraged by them and find joy or meaning in your relationships with them

from another thread: Stef wants people other than atheist non-an-cappers to be corrupt and wants people to sever their ties with them if they cant be convinced of the error of their ways.

It is complete black and white thinking (common to depressions btw... though of course at times also justified), not allowing for the possiblity that there may be genuine love and value in relationships you have with people who think that way, not cutting them any slack whatsoever...

of course they are devoted to their beliefs that they have had for so long and that mean or meant a lot to them in their lives, so some problems in discussing them with non-believers (esp. their son) and even some sniping is perfectly normal. not Good, but not a sign of irredemable corruption either.

they're just people after all, like we all are, with their good things and their flaws...

Stef says that he has often been accused of being too harsh on parents, that he doesn't realize that most parents are not and should not be abstract moral philosophers and that they basically do not really know what they are doing in the realm of ethics. Stef rjeects this idea by way of a practical exercise.

If you ask your parents what the capital of Madagascar is they will just say they have no idea without any problems, but if you ask them what goodness is they will fall silent, feel uncomfortabler and will do anything to change the topic. This according to Stef is because parents know that they have been telling their children all their lives what is good and what is not good while basically not having any thought out ideas about the question and when you ask them what 'goodness' is their ignorance both inh theory and in practice (do they practice what they preach?) about something so important that they have talked about so much is exposed. It would become clear that the authority they claimed when their children were young was false, like somebody who calls himself a doctor but who has no medical training whatsoever.

Because your parents have such great powers over you as a child the temptation to be believed rather than be right is great, because power corrupts. Because conditional moral instrcution would provoke ever more questions from children parents specialize in giving absolute moral instrcutions that just have to be accepted. Parents present their opinions as facts so they use the power of truth to reinforce lies, which is abonimably corrupt.

The other corrupt thing that parents do is reserve only for themsekves the option to present mere opinion as fact. When children do likewise they will be criticised by the very same parents. (e.g. parents want their children to go to chuirch because 'God exists' while this is wholly unproven, and they thus use absolutes to camouflage mere opnions that are often just based on feelings. But when children similarly try to base decisions on their feelings ('I dont want to go to church because I don't feel like it') their methodology is rejected by parents.

Another example of hypocrisy and double standards: parents tell their children that they should not blindly follow fashion, sexual habits, ways of speaking, clothing styles just because their peers do it. But parents are not attacking conformity per se, because their children's behaviour bothers them exactly because it is behaviour rejected by the parents' peers, so parents don't attack conformity per se but just competing conformities.

Comments
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I think Stef is right about the huge role of social fictions and mythologies in our world and about the way that we 'learn' these: we get told how the state is good, how pure capitalism will be disastrous, how the industrial revolution was horrible for the working class, how President Roosevelt and Lincoln were heroes, how God exists and is Good, how the world is going to collapse because of our consumption and exploitation, how you owe your parents a lot, and so on and so forth. And when you try to question these beliefs people will become defensive, angry, and want to change the subject.

So I think Stef is right about this diagnosis and about the signs (defensiveness) that indicate to the pathological state of our culture. And we tend not to see it because we are like fish being told about what water is: we are right there in the middle of it, we are formed by it, so it's hard to take a step back and look at it objectively.

I disagree with Stef on two things though:

1) he surely is right that there is a lot of hypocrisy going on in parenting and in the world in general and that parents abuse their authority they have over children, and I think this is incredibly common. But Stef here does not talk about degrees of hypocrisy.

I do not see why well-meaning parents who themselves have not thought about the social fictions in their lives cannot be decent and loving to their children. Even if they feel uncomfortable about talking about such things like 'what is goodness' this need not be a sign of their corruption. I mean, they may simply not used to be thinking about that soprt of stuff and are scared of thinking and questioning or simply don't really know how to do it.

This does point to the existnce of social fictions, of mythologies but the belief in those and the uncomfortableness in questioning them in itself need not point to great corruption on the parents' part. If they don't condemn their children thinking about it, if they don't ridicule them and respect them, and if they love and help their children in all sorts of other areas, but re-thinking social fiction simply is something that they don't want or 'can' spend their time on, then although you could call a part of them corrupt it seems like a huge overreach to condemn them to a huge degree. to be sure, Stef does not explicitly do that in these sections but he does elsewhere.

I think it is a valid point to say that most parents are not abstract moral philosophers and that therefore it may be being too harsh on them to greatly condemn them for their lack of insight into these matters while they when the child is young do pretend to know what is right and wrong. They are simply trying to do their best and are unsure what to do when confronted with inconsistencies or 'hidden' assumptions in the things they tell their children. When their behaviour is clearly exemplary of double standards, of hypocrisy I am more willing to see the parents as corrupt. But even there they may simply not have thought of the inconsistencies and don't immediately know how to solve them but just want to do what they think is best for the children even though they cannot really explain how that is the best. They trust their culture.

2. Stef has unusual definitions of 'science' and 'philosophy'. Science generally includes abiding by logic when constructing theories and so saying that philosophy is a combination of science and logic is misguided: science is formulating (abiding by logic as a condition therein) theories and testing them. Philosophy is something else still (but let's not go into a discussion of what exactly philosopy is right here)

I suspect that Stef is a proto-logical positivist who has not read much or any philosophy of science literature and is thus unfamiliar with the works of Thomas Kuhn, the methodology of the Asutrian School and other work. He is very committed to seeing the whole of science as empiricist while mathenatics, praxeology, geometry and othert disciplines are not empiricts but a priori. Also, Thomas Kuhn showed that the simply falsification-model of science is false and that sxcientific rationality can and does exist with a lot more uncertainty and incommensurability of theories than logical positivts make it out to be. If anybody is interested I can post a paper that I wrote about this 'Rationality, Rules and Values in Scientific Revolutions'

Well those examples of parental hypocrisy look pretty bad to me. Do you disagree?

see the added stuff above

Introduction to the philosophy of science paper

Quote:

Rationality, Rules and Values in Scientific Revolutions Term Paper for The Legacy of Dewey and WittgensteinNumber of pages including this one: 23 Introduction For the logical positivists science could be analysed into two different phases, the context of discovery and the context of justification. The dreams, values and experiences of a scientists might cause her to have certain insights, but for the justification of that knowledge all these things do not matter. They belong solely to the context of discovery and should be explained by psychology or sociology. Once the discovery is couched in a neutral observation language mathematical and logical functions can be performed on them to see what consequences can be deduced, how it is related to other ideas and so on. Here abstract universal rules are laid out as to how a scientist should proceed. At least that is the dream of the positivist. All a scientist needs is a functioning perceptual apparatus and a rational mind for her to do science. Such cognitive values as simplicity or explanatory power were thought to be reducible to algorithms that specify exactly what to do in cases of a choice between different theories for instance. In reality however, despite decades of research no such algorithms for rational behaviour in science have been found. Instead a new way of looking at scientific practice has come up partly due to the influence of the works of Thomas Kuhn. He sees science in terms of revolutions and of incommensurability. Arguments are circular; persuasion becomes important. Worse, such obscure qualities such as a certain aesthetic appeal of a theory can be decisive in the development of science. This seems the exact reverse of the positivist project and seems to make science into an irrational practice where good arguments not necessarily triumph. Moreover, it seems very difficult, nay impossible to determine what a good argument actually is, for that depends on the paradigm you support. And members of different paradigms talk past each other. If we define rationality as acting in accordance with universal rules, then science as Kuhn depicts it seems an irrational affair. In this paper however I will argue that we should not do so. This idea of rationality is based upon a wrong idea of how we go about, and moreover, how we should go about in our epistemic practices. We do not rely on absolutely sure rock bottom knowledge to justify our knowledge, and we do not have to follow abstract rules in order to get reasonable agreement. Against these ideas of abstract rules and individuality I will place the ideas of science as a practice done in a community. And it is the community together with the world itself that gives the normative dimension to science. If we realize this then it will be clear that the foundationalist and the scepticist positions are two sides of the wrong medal. I will sketch the outlines of an alternative picture, using some ideas of Dewey, Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Putnam and incidentally defend Kuhn against charges of relativism. How will I go about doing all this? First I will give an account of periods of normal science and try to show how past problem solutions rather than explicit universal rules are what make up the consensus in the community. Then we will see periods of revolution where exactly this consensus breaks down and scientists start to disagree with each other. Incommensurability threatens the scientists. I will clarify this concept; try to make clear why it should not be taken to imply a relativistic position. Thereafter I will focus on the role of values in theory choice and I will argue that it is precisely the indeterminacy of them that makes science so powerful. I will try to describe how the large implicit consensus, the attunement of scientists with each other, plays a big role in the resolution of such indeterminacy’s . This happens through a process of intelligent inquiry, where such moral values as willingness and open-mindedness play an essential role. I will then get a little deeper into the subject of criticism and try to show what the preconditions thereof are and how this can be encouraged so that better scientific practice can take. Finally in my summary and conclusions I will point out some advantages that this idea of science as a practice in a community has over its positivist rival and address briefly some problems that arise.

caveat:
my point about how parents need not be blamed so much for not questioning their culture and by consequently being defensive when asked questions about social fictions, does not imply that the collage of mythologies or social fictions we currently live in is not hella dangerous, and it does not mean that for children growing up in such a world where rationality is ignored over social fictions cannot cause great psychological problems for children (and the world as a whole): children learn how not to trust on their own thinking and simply accept stuff they cannot see or think about ('the invisible apple' as Stef calls it)

I think Stef has done a truly excellent job in making this clear and stressing the importance of it, but I do not follow him in the logical step towards moral condemnation of such parents that he appears to be taking.

Stef makes an excellent point that as children we desperately want to be good. And he also makes clear how this near-innate desire will get exploited:

'We are not punished for being bad. "Being bad" is invented so that we may be "justly punished".'
The use of force will be shrouded in the fog of "ethics".

When parents demand our respect and love for no other reason than that they are our parents and tell us ('Honor Thy Father and Mother') that it is ethically just to do so, we may feel confused, frustrated, or experience contempt or despair: for Stef love is the unvoluntary response to virtue and thus love and respect cannot be demanded and still, this is what parents and others do and it lures a whole lot of children in.

The demand to obey an individual is backed up by a universal principle (Honor They Father and Mother) which is absurd and a recipe for dictator-like situations in the family, and other relations. Most importasntly, because the child throughout his young years is bombarded by such illogical and contradictory commandments and 'thinking' the child is left confused and may have lost the capacity toi draw principles from interactions altogether. And for the parents the resut is a perpetual fear that children may become intelligent and independent enough that they will see through the false morality that their parents use and so further oppression and bullying is necessary in order to kill those faculties in the bud.

The fear and hatredthat so often mars the relations between different cultural groups stems not from gnorance (of the other group's habits and customs etc.) but out of knowledge. We recognize in them (e.gl. in Muslims) a clearly absurd and unsubstantiated mythology and at the same time we realize and quickly repress by projecting hatred or ridicule onto the other group our own unsubstantiated mythology, the fact that most of what we have been taught about ethics etc. is just as groundless as in the other group's case. Again, we attack the other group to still our own unconscious doubts about our own situation. (with fans of rivalling football teams we see the same thing). The proper thing to do is to start questioning our own mythology but we are afraid to do that.

One sort of mythology is love. All our lives we are surrounded by people who claim to love us, but when we ask them what they actually know about us, about our thoughts, feelings, interests etc. they draw a blank. So we are supposed to believe that people who know nothing about us in fact love us. This is absurd and it is a truth many are not willing to face. We are not given objective criteria for love (again, Stef says that love is an involuntary reaction to a rational standard of virtue) and thus we are left in a confused state with people claiming to love us but who dont know anything about us. The possiblity of a meaningful concept of 'love' gets eroded that way.

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I found little to disagree with Stef in these sections, other than that love may too be exhibited in relations where parents know very little about the inner lives of their children. The parents are just as afraid of opening up (to others and to their own children) but they do have some conceotion and some inclinations or instincts of love and they may show it in ither ways than explicit interest in their children's inner lives: I mean, simply helping them move for example can imho be a (clumsy) act of love.

Do others have more thoughts about this latter point?

Awhile ago I've read an article about mechanics of love in romantic sense. It's on: http://people.howstuffworks.com/love.htm/printable.

Here's an extract which describes the "matured" stage of love, which is called "attachment" in this article: "The attachment, or commitment, stage is love for the duration. You've passed fantasy love and are entering into real love. This stage of love has to be strong enough to withstand many problems and distractions. Studies by University of Minnesota researcher Ellen Berscheid and others have shown that the more we idealize the one we love, the stronger the relationship during the attachment stage."

Basically, what this means to me: at this stage two people got adjusted to each other so well, it's now possible to rely on relationship to last. They are not necessarily feeling passion to each other, but the connection is so strong at this point, that passion is not necessary anymore.

I think it's valid to extrapolate this on to a love to other family members. You grow up with them, and there's certain bonding happening during that period. People prefer to stay in relationships with parents not only because they were indoctrinated, but because it's easier from communication point of view. You literally know the guys, know what to expect, what's allright to do and what's not.

I think that defining love as an involuntary reaction to an objective standard of value is really narrow, and serves Stef's agenda more than it informs our understanding of interpersonal relationships. I think that it cannot be said that mothers do not genuinely love their infants, yet there can be no standard of value to compare an infant to. It has no virtue insofar as it is incapable of volitional action. I love my dogs, but they are not moral agents, yet the thought of their pain or suffering fills me with sorrow and a desire to help them. I make sacrifices on their behalf, and will eat less myself before taking food from their bowls. Love is perhaps ineffible and involuntary, but it is far from limited to people who meet our standard of virtue. Think to yourself, have you ever truly loved someone tragically, when their behavior has disappointed or frustrated you, ever more deeply because of that love? It is not an uncommon phenomenon. So, we must either define love that narrowly and come up with some other name for that kind of emotion, or broaden our definition of love so that Stef's version is only one kind of love.

If the definition of love is indeed reaction to objective values, then with infants and dogs and such, you might be personifying or projecting or even imagining values when you love them. With your baby, you might be noticing or imagining traits that you hope will turn into X or Y values, and you expect them to because you hold those values and you plan to raise your baby, and so you may indeed be loving your baby for values that they don't even have. With dogs, you might be personifying traits of a best friend or loyalty, or you may even be projecting your own personality onto your pet, and might love the pet for those perceived or imagined values. I really don't know, but it's a possibility I'll consider because I like Rand's definition of love, which is essentially a close match of objective values.

Dylboz wrote:

Think to yourself, have you ever truly loved someone tragically, when their behavior has disappointed or frustrated you, ever more deeply because of that love?

Can you please explain what you mean here? I don't understand.

It's a strong sense of value on your part for whatever reason you value that person or thing. You can try and nail it down to objective standards but sometimes it defies that, but that's where the involuntary part kicks in. And the above is really insulting to me, because you're ascribing a whole host of self-delusions and psychological pathologies for what are healthy expressions of emotion, bonding and value. The only one that is not healthy is the last, that you don't understand, which, I think is a fairly universal phenomenon. When you love someone, but they continually hurt or dissapoint you (watch an episode of Intervention). It takes sometimes years to disentangle yourself, to "fall out of love" (and that may never happen). Sometimes, the best you can hope for is to realize that you deserve better, and move on, but the attatchment remains. A billion pages of fiction and at least 7 or 8 movies I've seen on TV this week are based on that exact scenario.

I also want to add that neurophysiology is putting the lie to all that hoity toity philosophical pretense about love and virtue. They can map the biochemical processes in the brain, and they understand them us involuntary for sure, but they have little connection to virtue. The flood of endorphins and dopamine and other neurotransmitters that happens in both a mother and infant as they bond post-partum is quite real. So real, in fact, we've identified it as a severe pathology when it doesn't occur, leading in some cases to infanticide, but usually known as post-partum depression. I think we all know when we love someone, or are in love, and often it defies reason, it is, after all, a sort of sweet madness. We also know when we're not. On the flip-side of what I'm saying above, how about if you've ever been in a relationship where you should love the person, but you don't. They meet your every standard of virtue, they do not withhold affection, they treat you wondefully, taking care of you, buying thoughtful gifts, ready and willing to ball all night whenever the fancy should strike you, yet...there just no spark, the attraction has drained away (if it was ever there to begin with) and no matter how many times you point out to yourself your own objective values and how perfectly they match them, regardless that they meet your stated standard and desires, you cannot love them. If it were merely an involuntary response to objective standards, then that would never happen. Yet, I think that's even more common, though often, each party in the relationship is one side of that coin. One is the jilted lover, the other the reluctant jilter...