My Post on WordPress

I’ve been blogging since 2016, but I thought this post was worth sharing:

I think the Bible can never have the last say on morals. If that were true, then writers living now would have no purpose. But that’s not the way nature operates. That’s not only Emerson’s vision, but mine, too. Every writer is born with the purpose of broadcasting a moral message, whether her medium be literature or the other arts. Can we afford to dispense with arts and letters? Who would be bold enough to say that? And who would assess intelligence purely in terms of a person’s mathematical competence? Don’t humans need a moral IQ as well? Nature is the judge of right and wrong, whether you look at “nature” in an evolutionary way or a mystical way. I believe that I, for instance, tho blighted with schizophrenia, still bear a message that must get thru. I’m only one of a billion people with a similar mission. Nature hatches us like a mother sea turtle with her 150 eggs. Of those 150, perhaps 5 will survive to adulthood to return to the same beach to lay another batch… The coherence of my themes gets confounded by stressors internal and external, like the ratio of signal to noise, but what I want to say foremost is to give the schizophrenic a voice. That is, to shut up and listen for a change. We think and act more slowly, yet when indulged with patience, and when given half a chance, we can say some things that will blow your mind. I have personally chatted online with some pure geniuses who happen to have this disease. It inspires me to know that many of these creative people publish their writing and artwork. Not one of us is expendable. Every creature born, esp human, has gifts to bestow on the sentient and non-sentient world. For those of you following me, I am sincerely grateful. Your open minds will be rewarded.

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I wrote a rap it went something like

Like the idols in the Muslim tradition
Before Muhammad came too soon
And said I’m the final prophet
When we can all add a little to the pot, yet

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My friend asked me “are you the final prophet”

I say no, the last man or woman to prophesize before the apocalypse is the final prophet :wink:

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A lot of my moral views are seriously offensive. :fire:
There are scientific tests on moral development.
They are more concerned with how advanced your reasoning is than with what your views are. Of interest here is that the probably most famous of these tests had to remove the highest stage of moral development because so few people ever reached it. And the majority of adults never even reach the one under that one.

Many children are more advanced at moral reasoning than most adults.

So it’s the how over the what? Like method? In the West it’s usually logic. Epistemological rationalism. I lost my confidence in logic in 1989.

I have reasoned very much the same way. A moral code without myth fallacies to justify them.

I am trying to pull together enough thoughts and material to formulate a code of ethics and hopefully publish a book in a few years. I need that long just to research when I have time, think, and right. I go through a total process that requires all of my mind which I can’t dedicate to the problem right now. So it’s on the back burner.

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It’s very tied to cognitive development. The two most famous theories are both based on cognitive development. There is also a strong correlation between cognitive development and moral development.

The two most famous are Piaget’s theory of moral development and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. Piaget was mostly interested in cognitive development and based his theory on that. Kohlberg’s is based on Piaget’s theory, but is more specific and descriptive.

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For me, it’s as simple as Hume’s sympathy meta-ethics. Would we just as soon step on a person’s gouty toes as on the pave? We do not because we empathize.

Ethics is very different from the scientific study of moral thought. Ethics is prescriptive and science is descriptive. Roughly.

Normative = prescriptive? Sorry; define, please.

Yeah, sorry. Normative is prescriptive. I have changed it now because prescriptive is a better word.

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Okay. Just as linguistics is descriptive, grammar prescriptive.

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Yep!

For most people there is a significant overlap between disgust and moral opinions. Like if you ask people if it’s wrong if two sterilized siblings have sex, most will say yes, but not be able to back that up with anything substantial. They will say things like “it’s unnatural” or “God says it’s wrong”. It’s really because they think it’s yucky. It offends them. Emotions.

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Like Oprah. Spinoza says something awesome about disgust vs. delight. Things are not more or less perfect according to how we respond to them.

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Yeah. And a lot of people use the “unnatural” argument very frivolously to describe things they don’t personally like. If it gives them negative emotions, it must be unnatural.

Morality is strange.

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I see it as a book ever being revised or footnoted. Everyone is invited to add to it.

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Group decisions are usually better than expert decisions. We’re a social problem-solving species, after all.

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So, no philosopher king, right? I agree that dictatorship prolly wouldn’t work. And then there’s your AI idea.

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Yeah. I forget what it’s called, but there’s a term for it. Averaging many people’s guesses gives a better answer than experts’ guesses for most things where there is much uncertainty and no clear way to solve the problem.

I like my AI idea, though. :smile:

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Hey: no hard feelings for having posts shut down a few times. Sorry about that.

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