Net cool :)

[tinyjo]

Well, I am now cool - it's official. Finally I can bask in the smug glow of having been the first to do something. Yes, the Philosophy magazine is now being discovered by the net community (see here and here) :) I can proudly announce that I sent this link via email ages ago (ah, if only I'd had a livejournal then :) ), already subscribe to the print version of the mag and playtested the Shakespeare vs Britney Spears game! I know that this is appalling boasting but it just makes me feel cool! My fave bits on the site are the Philosophical Health Check and the logic tests, possibly indicating that logic/consistency is very important to me (surprise, surprise). This was also indicated when I did the Morality play test and came out as basically believing that moral principles should be consistent across scale and geography. See - philosophy is cool after all :)

Comments

[jinty]

That Philosophical Heath Check was quite good! You can tell I'm a philosopher by training, cos I got a low tension score too --

Tension Quotient Score Tension Quotient = 13%

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Questions 1 and 27: Is morality relative?

You agreed that:
There are no objective moral standards; moral judgements are merely an expression of the values of particular cultures
And also that:
Acts of genocide stand as a testament to man's ability to do great evil

The tension between these two beliefs is that, on the one hand, you are saying that morality is just a matter of culture and convention, but on the other, you are prepared to condemn acts of genocide as 'evil'. But what does it mean to say 'genocide is evil'? To reconcile the tension, you could say that all you mean is that to say 'genocide is evil' is to express the values of your particular culture. It does not mean that genocide is evil for all cultures and for all times. However, are you really happy to say, for example, that the massacre of the Tutsi people in 1994 by the Hutu dominated Rwandan Army was evil from the point of view of your culture but not evil from the point of view of the Rwandan Army, and what is more, that there is no sense in which one moral judgement is superior to the other? If moral judgements really are 'merely the expression of the values of a particular culture', then how are the values which reject genocide and torture at all superior to those which do not?

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Questions 8 and 18: What is faith?

You disagreed that:
It is quite reasonable to believe in the existence of a thing without even the possibility of evidence for its existence
But agreed that:
Atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God

In disagreeing with the first statement, you are acting consistently with the general principle which states that in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it is not rational to believe it. For example, it is not possible to disprove the possibility that there are invisible pink fairies at this moment circling the planet Pluto, but we don?t countenance it as a real possibility because there is no evidence for their planetary activities. This is not to be thought of as a matter of faith, but of sound reasoning. But asserting that atheism is a faith just like any other, because it is not possible to prove the non-existence of God contradicts this principle. It replaces the principle 'in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it is not rational to believe it' with the principle, 'in the absence of good grounds for believing something, it requires faith not to believe it'. For this reason, atheism is not a matter of faith in the same way as belief in God. In short, belief without evidence (a form of faith) is not the same as non-belief due to lack of evidence (rational refusal to assent).

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I got that first one too. It's definatly tricky. I guess it's one of those ones where I didn't quite think through properly what it meant to say that "Genocide is evil" - I read it more as "I think genocide is evil" which is subtly different.

The other one I get is the problem of evil - I said both that there was a loving god and that it was wrong to alow suffering that you could easily prevent to happen. The question then is well how come God does. I'd say a couple of things to that. Firstly, I don't believe that the morals which apply to us would also apply to God - he's a completely different type of being. Secondly, what appears as suffering to us may not appear as suffering to God, who would be judging by other criteria. And thirdly (more of a pedantic niggle) I only said a loving god, not a moral one.

Basically I love things like that which really make you think about why you believe what you believe and how it all fits together :)

assuming annoyance

[liriselei.livejournal.com]

cool test - i'm mildly irritated by the PHC, though, since in each of the three cases where they claimed my answers were (wrongly, as much as anything can be right or wrong) in tension it was due to the test's extrapolation of unwarranted assumptions about the motives and reasoning and extent of scope behind my responses - i'd have expected better from a philosophy magazine !

Re: assuming annoyance

[truecatachresis.livejournal.com]

That was the problem I had with the test when I did it a while back. It claimed that I had two points of tension (one of them being the "evil" as Jinty above, don't recall the other) but even as I was answering the questions I realized that they (the questions) were inadequate, as they were statements with which I was only mostly inclined with which to agree. The test then presumed to tell me how I might resolve my tensions - when, quite frankly, I had already thought about these issues myself.

Re: assuming annoyance

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

I think that the test was only saying that these beliefs could be in conflict, not necessarily that they were. If you'd already thought about the issues they raised then that simply shows that your philosophy is already a well examined one in that you have mentally already been through this process for your beliefs and made sure you can reconcile them.

Re: assuming annoyance -- don't

[jinty]

Yeah, to reiterate what tinyjo says above -- just cos you've thought about these issues doesn't mean that everyone will have. Usually they won't have, in fact.

That's why they used the word 'tension' not the words 'right and wrong'.