Who do you think is actually most responsible for the current state of morals and ethics in the present day.Who can I genuinely blame for all of the problems in the world.I need to know.
john calvin
>>23825636Whichever one had the most influence on the French Revolution.
>>23825636Christ
You’ll be disappointed by this OP, but by the time a philosopher comes around and puts forth a theory, the real world that birthed that theory existed before them, so they’re always a symptom of the problem more than the cause of it.It’s been a slow decline throughout the ages, so I’m not sure if I can point the finger at anyone in particular except the first in line who would be Protagoras, but if you want to see “peak consequences of damage to ethics” you’ll want to look at what the intuitionists have been saying.
>>23825636not a single philosopher has ever had an iota of an effect on world history, not even marx did
>>23825683>ProtagorasThales*
>>23825636Mill and Hume by far
Mill and RousseauEven if they didn't exist, someone else would have come up with their ideas.
>>23825636Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press?If you hate the modern world, mass literacy is your biggest enemy.
>>23825636If you want two good diagnoses there is pic related and Alasdair MacIntyre's classic After Virtue.MacIntyre is great on the point that people have straight up forgotten how the terms of ethics were used and what they even meant in the classical tradition (this is perhaps even more true for metaphysics). For instance, when people want to talk about some sort of naive theory of morality where different acts/things have some sort of static level of goodness they will refer back to antiquity or the middle ages, or even call this sort of thing "Platonic good."But Plato, Aristotle, and the rest of the tradition were plenty aware that what is deemed good varies by time and place. Indeed, in an era where culture shifted dramatically over fairly short distances this was impossible to miss; barbarians had different ways. They got that the human good was bound up in social practices, they just also understood that social practice isn't arbitrary.If anything, Aristotle might have the human good too bound up in the polis (something MacIntyre gets at).But the biggest change here is castrating goodness by separating off practical reason (whose target is the good, what is desired) from "moral reason," a sort of abstract good that only deals with morality. This is why people completely misunderstand the older tradition. In their minds "moral goodness" is something completely different—sui generis. But I think Schindler's thesis is actually more important. He focuses on how modern notions of freedom define freedom in terms of potency, power. Freedom as "the ability to choose anything," as opposed to the classical view of freedom as the self-determining capacity to actualize the Good. So in the modern tradition freedom is indeterminate, and indeed any determinacy is a threat to maximal freedom (something Hegel, who embraces the classical view, deals with a lot early in the Philosophy of Right).This focus on potency can be seen shaping culture to a surprising degree. It's sort of the cornerstone on which modern political theory and ethics tend to be built. It even infects metaphysics—consider Derrida and Foucault's arguments for why ontology limits freedom, or Deleuze's attempt to correct this by making ontology "creative." Well, this presupposes that freedom is fundamentally potency not act, for if ontology IS more something we discover, then their approach simply leads to ignorance, and ignorance of what is truly good leads to a lack of freedom. Someone only chooses the worse over the better if they are either suffering from weakness of will or do not know what is truly better. Even Milton's Satan has to say "evil be thou my good," as "evil be evil to me," would make no sense.As for the roots, Schindler traces it as far back as voluntarist elements in St. Anselm and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, but it doesn't really become pernicious for him until late medieval nominalism. It's really fideism and voluntarism in the Reformation that do it.
>>23825716The univocity of being comes in here, since it is what helps lead to voluntarism.Once you get voluntarism, divine command theory, etc., then it's just a matter of atheism and secularism triumphing over Christianity and suddenly the individual is now in place of God as the sole arbiter of the good. From the "every prince a Pope in his own lands" of the Reformation to "every man a Pope in his own house," to simply "every man is God with respect to his own beliefs."I think Schindler can be overly polemical—there are some very good things about modernity—but I do think the thesis is broadly correct.Metaphysics plays a role too, the rise of nominalism and subject/object dualism. But honestly, I think this can be tied back to the redefinition of freedom. So many arguments against realism fall into the trap of elevating potency over act in the analysis, once you start seeing it you begin to see it EVERYWHERE in modern thought (and I was a nominalist).We value freedom in the West. It ranks even above happiness. Indeed, as Hegel points out, freedom presupposes happiness in the sense that no one freely chooses to be unhappy, and so they are only unhappy if they are not free to actualize what will make them happy (due to ignorance, lack of self-control, lack of power, having to trade off relative goods, etc.). So freedom sits at the center of our philosophy. And once freedom is ultimately indeterminate, then there is a push to make EVERYTHING indeterminate in order to maximize our freedom. Hence nominalism, hence deflationism vis-á-vis truth, etc. Nothing can be concrete, not even truth, because any definiteness is a constraint on choice.But of course, if metaphysical truth is out there, this is just limiting our freedom through delusion and ignorance...
The jews
>>23825699Fritz Haber is probably most directly responsible for the current state of the word.
>>23825636Not Kant because strict adherence to the categorical imperative has never been tried (mostly because it's autistic as fuck).
>>23825743Actually, nm, it just occurred to me that Kant and other deontologists may have played a part in making moral philosophy seem comical, thereby being something of a harbinger for the later moral decay.
>>23825743He's already blundered by trying to abstract into rules for "all rational agents."Human life takes place in particular social and cultural settings. The human good is filtered through historical and social contexts. You cannot define it in the absence of a consideration of these, even if it is not reducible to these (which it is not, social practice is not caused by nothing outside of other social practices, they are not arbitrary). The same is equally true for human biology, although this is perhaps even more obvious. The human good is defined in terms of human biology, but it isn't reducible to it either, in part because human nature is to live as part of a historically situated community.The Enlightenment errs by trying to abstract away the relevant context. The Post-Moderns err by trying to reduce the human good to "nothing but" these contexts, and indeed by trying to make the good arbitrary.
jesus and marx, the rest dont even compare
>>23825636Blame yourself.
>>23825636Martin Luther
>>23825636Ockham is a pretty common target, and it's not entirely an example without merit.Scotus to, but to a lesser extent.I like Deely, who blames it on all of the moderns for ignoring Poisot and really most of scholasticism and a great deal of the Patristics, but this seems like only a partial answer.Taylor's Secular Age is pretty good on the transformation. It took several centuries and a lot of moving pieces to fuck ethics into the ground.
>>23825743The golden rule is already the categorical imperative to most people. Most people don’t literally take the golden rule to mean “if I were on trial I would want to be set free so prisons should release all prisoners.” That’s just nonsense
This anon >>23825683 told the truth.This anon >>23825716 >>23825734 told the truth.And this anon >>23825782 told the truth.The rest? A bunch of antisemites, tradcaths, and anticommunists. Put up or shut up you infants.
>>23825686ha ha that's cheeky fucker
>>23825716>>23825734>muh nominalism>muh univocity of being>muh voluntarismThis shit is an incredibly tiring narrative that keeps getting passed down by seething Thomists throughout the ages. There's nothing about the "univocity of being" that explains trannies. Some trannies are nominalists (it's just a name, chud!), while others are hardcore Platonists (my soul participates in the form of a woman, even if my body appears otherwise). It literally has nothing to do with the problem. The narrative is just philosophical vibe word salad. That's it.
>>23825819>implying trannies are a problemThis is just stupid. There were trans people in ancient times long before modernity hit. It’s not a modern problem.>implying a personally held philosophy disproves a social problemYou’re making a compositional fallacy to boot. So what if some trans person is a Platonist. About 30% of mathematicians still give platonism credence (from a survey I can’t find anymore). That doesn’t mean that nominalism hasn’t been a can we throughout the ages.
>>23825842>This is just stupid. There were trans people in ancient times long before modernity hit. It’s not a modern problem.You don't seem to be a big fan of precise thinking, so you can be forgiven for not understanding the concept of magnitude, comparison, etc.>About 30% of mathematicians still give platonism credence (from a survey I can’t find anymore).Brainlet detected. There is nothing Platonist about "mathematical platonism." Let me guess, you haven't even read Plato's Republic, eh?
>>23825819Well no, that sort of argument can (and sometimes is) made in a poor way. "Everything was great until that evil Ockham..." But it's also not without its merits.One does not need to say that moves of late medieval nominalism entail the problems of modernity, or directly cause them, to make the case that they were immensely important for the emergence of modernity. It's simply impossible to read the major Reformation figures and not see these shifts at work, it's part of their thinking.It's a long story. Calvin is not Nietzsche. However, there are common threads in the story. The reason Reformation thinkers have this giant problem with predestination is because the prior solutions worked out in the Patristic era and a bit later don't work with innovations in metaphysics and theology (at least not nicely).Also, it's hard to take you seriously when you want to reduce the problems of modern ethics to "trannies" and the metaphysical positions held by them, an argument absolutely no one makes. Even the worst polemics against Ockham don't say that people become transexuals because of the univocity of being. This is your own fever dream.
>>23825882>Also, it's hard to take you seriously when you want to reduce the problems of modern ethics to "trannies" and the metaphysical positions held by them, an argument absolutely no one makes. Even the worst polemics against Ockham don't say that people become transexuals because of the univocity of being. This is your own fever dream.God forbid I take one element of modern degeneracy and examine it on a post. There might be some retard who might think that that's the entirety of my problem with modernity. And the way you're phrasing this rebuttal doesn't even make sense. Are you trying to say that you're too cool to consider that argument? You must not be familiar with the way people think these days, or you're lying to me about why you are attracted to anti-nominalism in the first place. People use nominalist arguments to justify doing whatever they want all the time. The reason people are attracted to realism these days is because they think it might have the salvation for an objective moral standard, or at least the possibility of objective knowledge, in the face of modern freedom.
>>23825636Satan, obviously. I'm not even being facetious. The world was warned through all its myths, about where materialism and hedonism, as values, would lead, and who leads them: demons, devils...in Abrahamism, Satan. So the answer, regardless of what people say, is Satan.
>>23825636>current state None of those. It's George Soros.
>>23825659Definitely not Christ. Not even a single bit. The current state of the world is the most anti-christ thing imaginable.
ultimately, Paul of Tarsus. The original psyopreal ones know this is intuitively true
