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[Eschar]

I mean, it's a truism that if one doesn't believe in the supernatural they don't have transcendent reasons to prop up their ethics. But MT's  argument looked more like: one can't have ethics without a belief in the supernatural, because ethics have to be transcendent.

Well, I'm not sure where other than a transcendent source one would get a justification for moral systems. You can show that being ethical is good for something you value (not causing harm to others, for example), but you then have to argue why that something is a thing that should be valued, and then provide reasons for that justification, ad infinitum. Religion gives you a should for your 'shoulds' that declares itself to need no further justification, i.e. "you shouldn't harm others because they're the property of God*," which I think is why MT argues that ethics needs a transcendent source.

*Doesn't make the religion true, or that particular justification not disgusting, though.

[McTraveller]

Yes I think Eschar covered what I was going to say - I was busy shoveling snow and doing some other maintenance activities this morning.

I was not saying you can't have ethics without religion; I was just curious about how people handle the non-finite justifications for non-theistic views.  I do accept that while theistic views have "finite" justification for ethics, the transcendence of it often doesn't sit well.

I do understand the naturalistic view of how we as humans probably evolved to have a sense of ethics because a sense of ethics increases probability of survival.  But that's an emergent phenomenon, not a "purposed" phenomenon - that is, you can't say that type of ethics is "better", just that it correlates with a higher probability of survival.  No value statements needed.

[wierd]

That's getting dangerously near a philosophical argument about the nature of the word "Better".

What exactly IS "better", compared to "worse", without an arbitrary intelligence's whimsy?

Is chocolate icecream better than vanilla?  Etc.


This is especially so, when one tries to hand-wave away the more practical means of asserting "betterness", such as "fitness" in terms of evolutionary survival contexts. (like just happened.) 


You can't have the kind of meaningful discussion over "should" without first discussing its antecedent-- "better".

[Cthulhu]

It's this simple. Everyone in my town mows the lawns, the council mows the burms. A low to ground prickle flourishs and flowers are decapitated.
I stopped mowing my lawn, flowers encourage the bees and the long grass shades out the prickle weed thus killing it, the insects love the wild lawn and with the straw I can grow mushrooms, with the insects the birds come and they eat the white butterfly thus my crop is rarely decimated. My soil is incredibly myceliated and retains water. My garden is happy. I can feel it.

Humans do things that make no sense to the betterment of themselves because of our continually adopted culture.
Cows are not smart. Go back 500k years and meet the aurochs of then. We bredd them to be stupid too.
Dogs kill beyond their means unlike the wolf.
Sure we are smart but we don't often look beyond our short life spans and our eternal cultures we cling to.

From an evolutionary standpoint being smart is only valuable inasmuch as it gets you to reproduce.  Aurochs is extinct.  Cow is not.  Killing beyond means is an interesting one.  I'm suspicious of the claim that wolves don't kill beyond their means, surplus killing is very common among predators, precisely because overconsuming is adaptive, especially in communal species.  Including humans.

In the context of early hunter/gatherer tribal societies, which function very similar to chimpanzee societies, the tribe that lives within its means and carefully manages its environment for sustainability will be outcompeted by the tribe that reproduces as fast as possible and consumes everything in reach.  It will have a higher population, which is everything in tribal warfare, and it will easily overpower its sustainable neighbor when it needs their pristine territory.  A perfect example is the plains indians, who despite having their reverence for the buffalo, would mass-kill herds by running them off cliffs, and strip the meat off the top layer while leaving the rest to rot.  Even if you use every part of the buffalo, you need more of some parts than others.  Gnon's preferences are very simple and often counter to common human sensibilities. 

That being said, natural lawns are preferable to monoculture grass lawns for many reasons, and everyone should at least try to set one up, see how mad you can make the local board.

[Eschar]

What is Gnon? I presume you made a typo but I can't think of any likely words in context.

[ChairmanPoo]

I'll consume the living *and* the dead

[Cthulhu]

What is Gnon? I presume you made a typo but I can't think.of any likely words in context.

Reverse acronym for Nature or Nature's God.  Convenient term for whatever blind or directed processes underpin the operations of nature.

[Baffler]

It's this simple. Everyone in my town mows the lawns, the council mows the burms. A low to ground prickle flourishs and flowers are decapitated.
I stopped mowing my lawn, flowers encourage the bees and the long grass shades out the prickle weed thus killing it, the insects love the wild lawn and with the straw I can grow mushrooms, with the insects the birds come and they eat the white butterfly thus my crop is rarely decimated. My soil is incredibly myceliated and retains water. My garden is happy. I can feel it.

Humans do things that make no sense to the betterment of themselves because of our continually adopted culture.
Cows are not smart. Go back 500k years and meet the aurochs of then. We bredd them to be stupid too.
Dogs kill beyond their means unlike the wolf.
Sure we are smart but we don't often look beyond our short life spans and our eternal cultures we cling to.

From an evolutionary standpoint being smart is only valuable inasmuch as it gets you to reproduce.  Aurochs is extinct.  Cow is not.  Killing beyond means is an interesting one.  I'm suspicious of the claim that wolves don't kill beyond their means, surplus killing is very common among predators, precisely because overconsuming is adaptive, especially in communal species.  Including humans.

In the context of early hunter/gatherer tribal societies, which function very similar to chimpanzee societies, the tribe that lives within its means and carefully manages its environment for sustainability will be outcompeted by the tribe that reproduces as fast as possible and consumes everything in reach.  It will have a higher population, which is everything in tribal warfare, and it will easily overpower its sustainable neighbor when it needs their pristine territory.  A perfect example is the plains indians, who despite having their reverence for the buffalo, would mass-kill herds by running them off cliffs, and strip the meat off the top layer while leaving the rest to rot.  Even if you use every part of the buffalo, you need more of some parts than others.  Gnon's preferences are very simple and often counter to common human sensibilities.

But when you do this you end up smacking face-first into Hume's is-ought problem. It's probably true that the locust chimps will outcompete the gaian chimps in the short run, then either all starve to death or have their population collapse and stay small - maybe eventually establishing a stable equilibrium by selecting for groups that reproduce more slowly or something but more likely just going through the same motion over and over again. But it doesn't follow from that fact that the locust chimps (or gaian chimps) are better than their counterparts, at least not without relying on other axioms that don't exist in the context of ecology.

That's getting dangerously near a philosophical argument about the nature of the word "Better".

What exactly IS "better", compared to "worse", without an arbitrary intelligence's whimsy?

Is chocolate icecream better than vanilla?  Etc.


This is especially so, when one tries to hand-wave away the more practical means of asserting "betterness", such as "fitness" in terms of evolutionary survival contexts. (like just happened.) 


You can't have the kind of meaningful discussion over "should" without first discussing its antecedent-- "better".

It's even worse. "should" can't be meaningfully discussed without discussing "better," but "better" is itself meaningless without "good."

[Tingle]

The funniest shit is that people spray dandelion with cancer causing chemicals.
Have you ever eaten it? Drunk dandelion flower tea or root coffee. Good for cleaning blood.
This culture we grown inside is an illusion of our true reality. The corporate matrix. We are more than what we are and we will show you

[wierd]

Why even care about the dandilions at all anyway? It's not like they are a hazard, like goathead stickers are. 

It's once again "but its so... UGLY!" and "WHAAAA! My property Value!" driving dumbassedness.

[Kagus]

Good for cleaning blood.

Thanks, Dr. Lecter.

[Loud Whispers]

The funniest shit is that people spray dandelion with cancer causing chemicals.
Have you ever eaten it? Drunk dandelion flower tea or root coffee. Good for cleaning blood.
This culture we grown inside is an illusion of our true reality. The corporate matrix. We are more than what we are and we will show you

Not only are they poisoning themselves with the herbicides, but there is something absolutely ludicrous with the way so much horticultural and agricultural practice creates its own demand for the various -icides. You use pesticides and kill off all the local ladybugs, dragonflies and various other predators, rendering yourself entirely dependent upon pesticides you previously did not need. You use herbicides to kill off nitrogen fixing plants like dandelions which were improving soil quality, forcing you to use fertilisers, with the additional damage done to your local ecosystem by fertiliser runoff eventually poisoning your water too! Then you use higher yield strains in lieu of local strains in order to improve yields, resulting in your local strain being lost, then everyone collectively slapping their faces when local conditions kill the high yield crop and millions of farmers go bankrupt, commit suicide or become dependent on pesticides, seed & fertiliser they hitherto did not need

Honestly we've gone backwards since the green revolution in the 1800s. And that's before you get to the ridiculous shit like the massive overproduction of corn and soy, which is done because it's profitable, but it's profitable because the US government is subsidizing production for which there is not the demand... Literally paying to destroy your land. It's one of those weird things where the US government doesn't let the free market force farmers to reduce land usage or cut costs by adopting sustainable agricultural models, but the US government ALSO doesn't stop small farmers from going under amidst trade-war induced price fluctuations, resulting in them being devoured by larger farming corporations who can afford sufficient silage & take hits for longer. Literally just subsidizing corporations to buy out small farmers' land, with the result being that despite having the YUGEST MOST PATRIOTIC big boi in White House, the orange caterpillar has done nothing to stop foreign investors, even ones from CHY-NA from buying the shit out of American farmland. And doubly fuck you if you lack institutional support - the number of black farmers declined from 1M in 1920 to 45k today

That's why I'm pretty pleased with UK garden culture, as for the most part it's pretty sensible, and the British gardeners are generally too lazy to apply chemicals until summer's arrived. British farming however... There's a great book called Sting in a Tale, which describes how bees lived happily alongside British farms until WWII, when massive wildflower meadows were ploughed over to make way for farming space, and the farming space was never let to sit fallow after the war ended. That single-handedly wiped out a whole species of bee in the UK, and it's no wonder why all other bees are struggling. Yet we all know this, yet this all continues - the tragedy of the commons is that the edge of the cliff is known by everyone but no one driver is taking their foot off the pedal, and we're all stuck in the passenger seat of this dying beast

This is all because you heathens would not farm God's Way
It's hilarious because they describe their methods as predating the existence of mankind, but they're all methods you'd find anywhere between 1700's Ireland and Russia. The no ploughing rule is a bit situational, sometimes beneficial and other times not, but the other two rules of mulching the soil and employing crop rotation is just a natural way of restoring soil quality and stopping soil erosion / critical bee depletion / monocrop pest & fungal failures. Doesn't seem like the evangelicalism adds much here besides missionary zeal; reminds me of the dudes who campaigned to get the Higgs-Boson a new popular media name: ANYTHING but the God particle

[Cthulhu]

It's this simple. Everyone in my town mows the lawns, the council mows the burms. A low to ground prickle flourishs and flowers are decapitated.
I stopped mowing my lawn, flowers encourage the bees and the long grass shades out the prickle weed thus killing it, the insects love the wild lawn and with the straw I can grow mushrooms, with the insects the birds come and they eat the white butterfly thus my crop is rarely decimated. My soil is incredibly myceliated and retains water. My garden is happy. I can feel it.

Humans do things that make no sense to the betterment of themselves because of our continually adopted culture.
Cows are not smart. Go back 500k years and meet the aurochs of then. We bredd them to be stupid too.
Dogs kill beyond their means unlike the wolf.
Sure we are smart but we don't often look beyond our short life spans and our eternal cultures we cling to.

From an evolutionary standpoint being smart is only valuable inasmuch as it gets you to reproduce.  Aurochs is extinct.  Cow is not.  Killing beyond means is an interesting one.  I'm suspicious of the claim that wolves don't kill beyond their means, surplus killing is very common among predators, precisely because overconsuming is adaptive, especially in communal species.  Including humans.

In the context of early hunter/gatherer tribal societies, which function very similar to chimpanzee societies, the tribe that lives within its means and carefully manages its environment for sustainability will be outcompeted by the tribe that reproduces as fast as possible and consumes everything in reach.  It will have a higher population, which is everything in tribal warfare, and it will easily overpower its sustainable neighbor when it needs their pristine territory.  A perfect example is the plains indians, who despite having their reverence for the buffalo, would mass-kill herds by running them off cliffs, and strip the meat off the top layer while leaving the rest to rot.  Even if you use every part of the buffalo, you need more of some parts than others.  Gnon's preferences are very simple and often counter to common human sensibilities.

But when you do this you end up smacking face-first into Hume's is-ought problem. It's probably true that the locust chimps will outcompete the gaian chimps in the short run, then either all starve to death or have their population collapse and stay small - maybe eventually establishing a stable equilibrium by selecting for groups that reproduce more slowly or something but more likely just going through the same motion over and over again. But it doesn't follow from that fact that the locust chimps (or gaian chimps) are better than their counterparts, at least not without relying on other axioms that don't exist in the context of ecology.

I never said either was better.  I only said some were adaptive.  I made no claims about what ought to be.

[Folly]

The primary function of the human digestive system is to filter out poisons. In small quantities pesticides and herbicides are entirely safe to eat. Anyone who says otherwise is just trying to sell you some crap that they put half as much effort into producing so that they could charge you twice as much.

[McTraveller]

So a completely different line of conversation, since I think we exhausted the previous one:

Question for the ex-Christans: did you leave to free yourself from something in Christianity, or did you leave to gain something that Christianity did not have?  Or a combination. As previous comments have shown, I'm interested in the distinction between a particular community vs. the core philosophy, too.