Bertrand strikes again!

Another amazing quote from the man who is fast becoming the precursive mouthpiece of my private thoughts.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
~Bertrand Russell

Your "Past" Can Kick You In The Ass!

What a bloody shock it was to be browsing the internet, and to stumble across this little reminder of our past! The real kick in the ass, is that it is not as it was 18 years ago, Rik has changed things and then put these songs up as R Society, which I don’t feel is accurate. I just feel that our names are attached to something that is not completely true!

Funny, thing “the past” is! This is how Rick and my story started, through Randy actually! Anyways, check out the link.

All I can do is shake my head, and Rick thinks it's all good!

http://www.soundclick.com/rsociety

Ethics

“Where do our ethical values and standards really come from? Were they always there? Are they unchanging?...The congnitivist view holds that ethical statements have the same status as those statements with which we express empirical knowledge or logical conclusions. The constitutional postulate “The dignity of man is inviolable” in article 1, clause 1, of the German Federal Constitution would, according to this principle, be evaluated by the same standards as the statement “The cat’s eyes are green” or the mathematical proposition “The sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees.”

“It [cognitivism] also corresponds to everyday experience, which we glady ascribe to as common sense.”

“However, two main difficulties have brought discredit to cognitivism. The first is the problem with the perception of moral facts. Man’s physiological sensory organs are clearly unsuited for this; for this reason, the cognitivist must admit to the existence of a higher, so to speak, a metaphysical means of perception, namely intuition. But the important role of intuition contradicts the claim of objectivity, which is the basis of cognitivism.”

“The second difficulty is the derivation of normative rules from statements of fact. According to the law put forward by the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), which states that what should be cannot be derived from what is, it is not permissible to base the deductive conclusion of a statement of fact on one evaluation. The conclusion would then go beyond the content of the premise…The advocates of ethical cognitivism are consequently instructed to develop binding moral commandments or prohibitions from moral facts entirely in the sense of the deductive ‘facticistic’ fallacy.”

“For the emotivists, there are no objective moral statements. In their view, for example, the statement “The dignity of man is inviolable” does not describe any external reality ascertainable with reason; it is much more the literary resume of a subjective feeling, an emotion…If moral statements always reflect only subjective and individual feelings, then neither logical argument nor a generally valid standard of values or action can be derived from them.”

“Institutionalism offers a way around the dead ends of cognitivism and emotivism…Moral facts must rather be seen as social institutions created by people throughout history, which are inter-subjectively constituted, stabilized, handed down and modified according to certain rules within a cultural and linguistic community.”

“Values…are thus developed socio-culturally as institutional facts. They are not objectively predetermined by nature, but are created by man at particular times for particular purposes and interpreted by man in concrete situations. Since values are therefore unstable and changeable, they require a societal consensus to be valid."

Axel W. Bauer

So….this brings to question, if there is no God, does “good” or “evil” really exist as factual realities, or simply as what society decides they are at a given time? It seems to me that no logical person can really determine what is innately good or evil (if anything is innately good or evil at all), at least not without then relying on the logically flawed cognitivism or emotivism, which would then make them illogical.

Anyhow, I thought this was interesting…..

Comments anyone?