Where were you when Sam Harris BTFO David Hume?

>tfw you don't understand utilitarianism because you only eat in restaurants

Uh, sorry christards but he already analyzed your brains and proved you're all stupid.

I'll never forget this

youtube.com/watch?v=cDQzijl6El4

>step five
>goes to the ought with no justification at all

wtf

is there an intellectual that has engaged with Sam Harris that hasn't completely annihilated him?

I literally cannot think of a single one.

>10 seconds in and he's already reduced Harris' stance to Nazism
How is this man not a complete hack

He didn't do that really, just used it as an example of universality vs objectivity and how we could arrive at a system of universally, but not objectively, true morality.

Some powerful worldly entity can enforce or educate a population into a universal system of morality, but only divinity can inform an objective system of morality.

He doesn't argue that atheists can't be good people even, but that you can't have an objective system of good and evil without something or someone who stands above/outside the system. To be fair, the stance that Harris takes was shitshattered by Hume like 250 years ago so Craig doesn't really even have to try. He could have just shut up after identifying the difference between universal and objective systems of morality and still have won the argument from a technical perspective.

good ol Sleepy Sam

Ironically, Big Daddy Peterson. He also got BTFO by a fucking anti-natalist. Now all he needs is to be BTFO by a PUA / evo-psych fanatic and he'll have won the complete-intellectual-failure award

Peterson was not btfo because neither were capable of reaching a mutual foundation.

scientism

Peterson was BTFO because he needs a whole snowflake onthology of his own which is ocmpletely unrelated to anything real for his jungian pap to work

>assume that there are no ought's or should's in this univerise
>5/ If we should to do anything...

>Let's Assume

This is what he should just call his entire philosophical system.

Can learning how to do the eidetic reduction be the sine qua non of being a philosopher already? How many years has it been since phenomenology revealed substance ontology to be naive? When will understanding this become the baseline?

...

San Harris got his shit wrecked by a fucking cartoonist and got completely chadded off the stage by Batman. This dude is in the intellectual backwoods trying to figure out WTF a pathos is.

How is it unrelated to anything 'real'?

If it is lightning, it ought to thunder.

At the end, he still has not found a way of empirically finding out (is) what sucks (ought) so he's literally back at square one with a retarded breaux slang.

Just as a reminder, here's the time he got eternally BTFO by Noam Chomsky and then published it for some reason.

samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse

>sucks
>suck
cringy idiot

The is/ought problem is solved if you take an evolutionary process into account. What it boils down to is a question of how patterns are found from data. We observed an event and its outcome. From memory, if we come across a similar event, we can make predictions on the outcome. We can then take actions that can benefit us. So what we should do comes from what have experience before. The main problem that people confused is arguing over what exactly we "should" do since there can be an infinite actions that one can take. For this we have to look at evolution. Not all actions are the same. Of all the probable actions one can take, only the ones that contribute to survival will be left. Thus it's stupid to put your hand on a hot stove since it will damage you and your potential at reproduction. It's funny because whatever it is that you "should" do is in someway always connected to survival or reproduction. Either your own, your family, or your people. No exceptions.

So this is clearly flawed. Among other things like the obvious petito principiis and dogmatic assertions, it is flawed in one way:

Seven.

He draws attention to people being selfish and then assumes that people will do something that sucks less for people overall. Unbelievable that someone like him would make a mistake this obvious. Clearly if these non-believing atheist humans are as cold and dark as he wants us to believe (doing things for themselves) they would NOT and even RESIST being forced into a utilitarian task if it netted them less utils overall. Just saying, this is exactly an explanation of why NO ONE does anything good for everyone, because everyone does nothing good for no one. In other words, if there is a way to exploit others in Sam Harris' materialist explanation of the universe, they will find it out and proceed to apply it. Congratulations Sam Harris, you are a fucking retard!

>The main problem that people confused is arguing over what exactly we "should" do since there can be an infinite actions that one can take.
No it's not. The main problem is that people don't agree about what benefit would look like. People want different things.

Craig is a textbook sophist. Harris's views on moral objectivity are wack, however.

>Craig is a textbook sophist

Does he teach kids rhetoric for money?

Peterson wanted to ground the entire discussion in a deliberate confusion of truth and fitness, which is plainly intellectually dishonest. If you doubt that, he himself refers to it as "playful" in their follow-up podcast--an admission that what he was saying shouldn't be taken seriously.

Of course, it's obvious why Peterson (and other religion apologists) want to conflate fitness and truth--because the only empirically supported arguments they can make are about the social and psychological effects of religious belief, and not the actual ontological content of those beliefs. It's all smoke and mirrors: they want to take the uncontentious fact that religious beliefs can modify your behavior "for the better" and dress it up in language that makes it sound almost like it's the hard claim their interlocutor actually objects to.

>Itz just evolutions bro
Anglos were a mistake

Hate to break it to you, user, but nobody can prove any ontological suppositions.

You caught me, I meant to invoke their unfavorable reputation and not their literal occupation. I'll accept whatever punishment you think is appropriate.

>Utterly DESTROYS OMFG BTFO ARGUMENT SNOWFLAKES
Americans were also a mistake

The sophists generally had an unfavorable reputation because they were moral relativists. Is WLC a moral relativist?

>Leave the philosophical equivalent on shitposting to me

I agree, but we needn't prove them to reason about their predictive efficacy.

Like how psychologists study the predictive impacts of belief on behaviour?

That's not the entire truth. See the Euthydemus. They were concerned with rhetorical tricks at the expense of clear reasoning.

But Peterson was right. Harris was going for true and false, Peterson was arguing for truth. True and false is only relative to how accurate a representations is in its prediction of reality. Harris was looking at truth strictly from a mathematical point of view where things are either true or false. Unfortunately reality is not so neat. Reality is more concern with actions than how accurate a representation is. Religious truth is tied to the actions that it's believers takes and not necessarily to the literal word about how the world is created.
It's like genetics. What is the truth of a sequence of dna code? This is a legitimate question to ask since this is concern with life. Harris would say DNA contains no truth and he would be arguable wrong.

Yes, exactly like that. If you thought I would dispute that, read my post again--I said those effects are uncontentious.

Sure, they didn't care about clear reasoning because they didn't believe there was A truth. They were relativists.

So you agree that there is no true ontological position, but we can comparatively study the impact of ontological belief on behaviour. Therefore, the only real reason to hold an ontological belief is due to evidence of its beneficial impact on behaviour. i.e., we can only really decide on truth with fitness.

One needn't be a relativist to be dishonest, and there's nothing in the Euthydemus that I recall that suggests they were interested in anything other than social prestige. I doubt they had any kind of serious commitment even to relativism.

In any case, it's obvious what I meant by my original comment, and your attempt to "correct" me about sophists had led to you being embarrassed by my actually being familiar with them.

>whatever it is they you "should" do is in some way always connected to survival or reproduction

>you should not rape
>you should not abort fetuses
>if you have an infant who's mentally retarded you should not leave him on the edge of a mountain to starve to death
>you should be okay with gay people marrying
>monks should stay celibate
>a Hindu should be vegetarian
>a soldier should sacrifice himself for his country
>you should kys

>Therefore, the only real reason to hold an ontological belief is due to evidence of its beneficial impact on behaviour. i.e., we can only really decide on truth with fitness.

No, you've missed the point--I suspect deliberately.

We can also measure things like, for example, the effect of prayer on outcomes, and determine that the ontological belief of the rough form "God responds to earnest prayers" doesn't have predictive efficacy. (If you dispute that this can be measured, then explain why we can justify beliefs with measures of psychological effects.)

Sure, but other beliefs do have impact on behavioural outcomes. So you can refine which beliefs actually have a significant impact (for example, on prosocial behaviour). This argument for fitness can determine what ontological truths people should believe, seeing as any ACTUAL ontological truth is impossible to know.

You seem to be under the assumption that the Euthydemus is the only source of information on the sophists. You can pretend to know what you're talking about all you like but you misused the term and while initially you admitted as much, now you're doing this silly shit. Nobody claimed that you have to be a relativist in order to be dishonest, I have now idea where you got that idea from.

Process of elimination is not the same as process of choice.
You should do a billion different things.
All of them except those that are in some way connected to survival and reproduction will be eliminated by time and nature. What you should do is what remains.

Go back and learn evolution. There's a reason why its a major philosophical thought that sprung an entire field of its own.

>argument for fitness can determine what ontological truths people should believe

Only in a tortured defintion of "should believe."

The thrust of the argument I am making is this: The fact that we do not have access to proof (in the logical, not colloquial sense) of any ontological position does not mean that all ontological positions have equal empirical probability. (You could take the position that empirical probability is meaningless--this is fine, but it is the end of any discussion.) If you grant any merit to empirical probability--which you clearly do in citing observed psychological effects--then you can reason probabilistically about ontological truths. Which is to say, we can make probabilistic estimates on the ontological status of claims like "God exists," and not just claims about social effects.

It isn't the only source of information. Please inform me of your source on the Sophists being in disrepute because of moral relativism, rather than rhetorical fallacies.

(My original response was sarcasm at your pedantry, because sophist is a well-known insult meaning a person who reasons fallaciously.)

But why does teaching towards an unattainable ontological certainty have more importance to you than reaching towards improved social effects using ontological beliefs?

*reaching

Perhaps it doesn't, but that's immaterial to the question of what category these beliefs belong to.

>There's a reason why its a major philosophical thought that sprung an entire field of its own.
Yes because we live in an age of dogmatic atheists whose opinions of scientific understanding is so bloated and confused they can't tell fact from fiction. You base your faith wholeheartedly to what can be observed, but you rest your faith completely in a theory that can literally NEVER be observed, except in conjecture concerning sediment which is most likely incorrect.

I think peterson is pretty open to the two truths doctrine, and has often said he thinks there are different kind of truths (i.e., ontological and pragmatic). It's Harris that can't seem to admit the reality of the second one, and (look at the OP twitter bs) tries to conflate them.

It's a lazy insult for people simply looking to dismiss others without having to explain their reasoning. It is ironically a sophism. As far as reasons to believe the sophists were relativists you can read any of the Greeks. Plato's Republic, Cirto, the Apology, or Aristotle's Organon. There's a good write up on it here.

cameronscottkarl.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/socrates-and-the-sophists-relativism-versus-realism/

If the Romans are your thing see what Cicero or Marcus Aurelius has to say about them. It's not a controversial position to hold that the sophists were relativists.

how do I know right now in this life which options will be eliminated by time and nature? You're putting the cart a little bit ahead of the horse here

>listing a bunch of stuff I've read

I'm curious where you think the Sophists are mentioned in Crito.

Saying there are "pragmatic truths" is a category error, and I contend it's intentionally deceptive. To say that we can produce social effects by causing people to believe things is not controversial. Why use the word "truth" to describe this phenomenon? Why call the Santa Claus story a pragmatic truth rather than a valuable fiction? I suspect because the arguer would prefer that we mistake their argument for so-called pragmatic truth for ontological truth.

As for Harris's strangely assertive objective utilitarianism, I have little to say in defense of it.

I'll take your preference for bickering over irrelevant shit for acquiescence. If you read those books how come you didn't know the sophists were relativists?

Interesting point. I'm just about to read William James principles of psychology so I'll take your opinion going in. Thanks user.

shitposting is far more self aware than harris' verbiage

>it's another "ought" episode

Because I don't believe Sophists were uniformly relativists. By my recollection Socrates almost everywhere (according to Plato) criticizes them primarily for their focus on "speaking well" rather than speaking truth. There's an entire dialogue about exactly this whose name currently escapes me.

Here is my question to you: why ask me if I thought WLC was a moral relativist if sophist is understood to mean someone who reasons fallaciously? I interpret it as you attempting to reveal that I didn't understand what I was saying--hence why I "bicker over irrelevent shit", ie point out that you are citing stuff that doesn't actually contain what you say.

The use of rhetoric in itself is not bad or immoral and this is obvious when Aristotle makes the distinction between good and bad uses in his Rhetoric. The problem the Greeks had with the sophists wasn't merely that they were rhetoricians, it was that they were amoral rhetoricians. That is why they were disreputable. The idea that the sophists were disreputable because they reasoned fallaciously is especially stupid because anybody who gets an argument wrong is reasoning fallaciously. That in itself is not immoral or worth disrepute.

I asked you a question to clarify what you meant by "textbook sophist" and you didn't answer. Instead you got offended and acted like I was trying to "get" you.

>begs the question
>"if you call this begging the question, it's not because hot stoves"
Modern "philosophers"

Well are stoves indeed, as they say, hot?

If you don't mind me saying I think it is you who has been proven wrong, he is right, and the genius of his argument is the use of the stove. Again, in numbers 3 and 5, (again he uses this argument often because it is something he relies on, because of his genius of course) he says that his argument is valid because if you were to put your hand on a stove that would hurt. GENIUS. COULD YOU THINK OF A BETTER SUPPORT FOR MORALITY. CLEARLY MORALITY IS DETERMINED BY PEOPLE COLLECTIVELY TRYING AS HARD AS POSSIBLE NOT TO PUT THEIR HANDS ON A STOVE.

YOU FOOL. WITH THIS ARGUMENT, WE HAVE MADE PROGRESS. THE STOVES ARE THE ENEMY, NOT WORDS OR IDEAS. CLEARLY AS LONG AS STOVES EXIST WE WILL NOT BE SAFE. THEN SAM HARRIS WOULD ARGUE WE HAD REACHED A PLATEAU OF HUMAN EXCELLENCE A SORT OF NIRVANA IF YOU WILL OF HUMAN REASONING. ONCE STOVES DO NOT EXIST PEOPLE COULD NEVER HAVE EXPERIENCES THAT ----------SUCKED---------- SO THEN WE WOULDNT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THEM ANYMORE.

I AWAIT SAM HARRIS' OBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION OF FURTHER EVENTS THAT '''''''''''CLEARLY SUCK'''''''''.

NO THIS POST ISNT SARCASTIC AT ALL. NOT AT ALL

>OMG BOOK IS THE COVER ONLY HURDUR

links for both please
cartoony and batman

I don't know what I dislike more, this moron or people that think Hume's opinion on the is-ought gap is the the definite truth of the subject.
Ship captains ought to behave like ship captains.

It reads stupidly but most of meta-ethics can't come up with a better answer than that. Either it's hand-on-stove arguments, or it's assertions about nature, or it's literally just "ethical statements express emotional attitudes"

As much as I think Harris is wrong about objective utilitarianism, I think his argument is better than the literal zero credit it's gotten in this thread.

His observation is not that hurting your hand points to some objective moral truth "out there", but rather that there are things that can be empirically verified as a universal aversion among human beings. If the question is, "What objective metric could there be for human conduct?" then one can point to an actual, empirical difference between certain kinds of conduct--namely, some of them hurt. You may not call that a moral statement, but is that more than an argument over semantics?

Or it could be, you know, God.

There was a thread recently that showed how God must have created objective morality, otherwise subjective morality would literally have nothing to gauge itself against if trying to determine whether it's subjective or not.

But to say it is biologically determined is clearly impossible, as you can see here. Unless you want to rely on stating that certain things are Darwinian-ly unpleasant experiences. Which is just plain retarded, but you can see it's what he's trying to do here.

>it's literally just "ethical statements express emotional attitudes"

You're not supposed to spoil the end of the syllogism. Some people want to figure it out for themselves.

Yeah I'm the guy who made the sarcastic comment. I understand. In fact, I sarcastically debated most of your post before you even made it. It's an excellent comment. Of prime quality. Look when I start to write in caps. That point right there is perfect to show you why defining morality as empirically verified universal aversions is just plain dumb.

>Or it could be, you know, God.
God's existence doesn't resolve the problem unless you believe divine command theory.

I would prefer that over most of the meta-ethical theories anyway desu

>In fact, I sarcastically debated most of your post before you even made it. It's an excellent comment. Of prime quality. Look when I start to write in caps. That point right there is perfect to show you why defining morality as empirically verified universal aversions is just plain dumb.

I assure you it's funnier when you read it to yourself.

Right, like God came down and gave instruction to those who follow him? Yes I believe that.

But before you harp on that, lets say I believed in God indirectly communicating with his people. What would you say to that? Anything at all? When I go over the fact that God communicates to everyone that exist in extremely personalized ways that only they can typically understand? In this way, I can take a transcendentalist approach towards receiving messages AS WELL AS the literal. And this works, but even without the literal it's evidence that God could show us how objective morality exists and even define it. Through signs, parables, and tales without directly communicating to us.

No one laughed against the post I made retard. Although I can guarantee you it made many people realize how foolish Sam Harris was.

The method of communication isn't what I mean to describe by divine command theory. I mean the ethical system in which "right action" is defined to be actions that conform to divine will. That is to say, there is no such thing as good independent of what God intends, precisely because he intends it. In this system, "God is good" is a tautology, true by definition.

This is, in my view, equivalent to moral nihilism, and is actually the most sensible religious ethics.

He beat Affleck only because he had the rest of the panel and the host on his side.

...

>Divine command theory (also known as theological voluntarism)[1][2] is a meta-ethical theory which proposes that an action's status as morally good is equivalent to whether it is commanded by God

>The method of communication isn't what I mean to describe by divine command theory

I will grant you that wasn't exactly the purpose of me delineating the two different communication styles in my post. But that's not really the point. I really wanted you to pick one of them to address so I would have something to work with. But lets move on.

>I mean the ethical system in which "right action" is defined to be actions that conform to divine will
That's correct, yes.

>That is to say, there is no such thing as good independent of what God intends, precisely because he intends it.
Incorrect of course, because we are always progressing with religion. In other words, let us say I am a Muslim. I believe that God continues to interact with humanity and will not stop doing so until his truth is permanently known in the hearts of all of us. Pretty nice philosophy right? Well lets see how this defeats your assertion of permanence in morality. I understand Jesus was born. And what did Jesus do? He rewrote morality significantly for the Jews. I understand Gabriel came down. And what did Gabriel do? He informed us of God's will further.

In both instances though, as has been discussed elsewhere recently, morality changed. And God oversaw it. We are to imply from this that the divine objective morality is determined by God and God alone. His signs and messages push us in the right direction. So morality is objectively defined, objectively pushed forward. As we progress towards understanding God exists, we go towards a sublime reality of peace and contemplation.

> "God is good" is a tautology, true by definition.

Correct.

>This is, in my view, equivalent to moral nihilism, and is actually the most sensible religious ethics.
You and Nietzsche, who inevitably had to take a chaotic, aphoristic stance on the theory of morality. Even Darwinian, frequently referencing Herbert Spencer. It's just not a philosophy that resonates with me. Nor does it make any sense.

Read Kierkegaard for some reliable interpretations of how your will affects reality.

>DAE pain is bad?

Because Peterson had no foundation to begin with

sam, we need to have a talk. you skipped your appointment last week

Anything from the reformation onwards was a mistake

>being against islam is racist

batman is a retard desu

hot stoves ought to burn your hand

Nietzsche already BTFO Hume during his discussions of the in-themselves in Will to Power.

>10 people stuck on an island
>9 guys and 1 girl
>Gang rape sucks for 1 girl,
>but 9 guys love it.