Dungeons and dragons and philosophy
Grammarsalad
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- I don't need any support, advice, or compassion, because even if I am the most ruinous man, I still feel so powerful, so strong and fierce. For I am the only one that lives without hope.
-To have failed in everything, always, out of a love of discouragement.
-It makes no sense to say that death is the goal of life, but what else is there to say?
«We have given eyes» pretend they sense naught but light÷none
«We have given tongues» yet they savour just sugar
«We have given life» yet for end looks humankind
Or so I would re-render our lamentation in English, some thirty thousand years after it was first chanted in an unwritten language with but two surviving speakers.
Unbearably, it's still just as relevant today as it was then, if not more.
"stabs his own heart and dies" rotflol
Kant believed that we are not in the business of judging souls, even our own, because we can never know on any given occasion whether we are really acting from self given moral maxim (which, for him, is the only way that we can truly act rightly--presumably, if we do this habitually, then we'd be good).
No book, even the holy monsters manual*, could tell us that all orcs are evil because if orcs can be evil at all, then they have the capacity to act rightly, to be good. Put another way, if they could only act wrongly, then they would be slaves to sentiment; they would not have autonomy at all in Kant's eyes, and so could not be good or evil. In various ways, this puts Kant at odds with Aristotle and Hume.
It's strange that this is left out because the comic indirectly brings up the enquiring murderer, which shows how much Kant was committed to personal autonomy. If your friend was hiding from a murderer, then you still cannot lie to that murderer if they ask about your friends whereabouts, according to Kant ( because that would be using the murderer merely as a means to an end-- the end being to save your friend from death).
Kant doesn't insist that one must tell the truth to the murderer, of course, but for Kant it would not be wrong to do so. That is, one would not be culpable if one did share the knowledge of the whereabouts of one's friend. If the murderer murderered them, then the murderers is the only one that is blameworthy.
Kant seems to take personal autonomy to be the sole component of moral responsibility**. If the orcs are known to have done something evil, and the orcs are autonomous, then, for Kant they would deserve punishment ( or rather, they have done something that deserves punishment-- again, we're not judging souls here. That's God's prerogative).
But if a paladin were to merely attack a bunch of autonomous creatures for no reason other than they took them to be "evil", then it would be the paladin that is doing wrong ( and, if Kant were the dm, he would probably make said paladin fall).
* Many critics claim that Kant's moral philosophy is a form of "rule worship", that it implies that if there was a complete book of rules on right conduct, then the Kantian would have to follow those rules to the letter, regardless of what they said, or what the Kantian thought about the matter ( kind of like a lawful stupid rules lawyer).
But Kant departed from previous thinkers ( including, but especially divine command theorists, who thought that right = whatever God commands) in his particular take on moral autonomy. For Kant, the autonomous agent must be the sole author of moral law. They must grasp through a form of reasoning-- which need not necessarily involve deep contemplation--we can know without considering the matter at length that murder is wrong--that x is right or wrong ( or neutral) and act accordingly, if possible.
Morality cannot come down from any external authority, even divine authority ( or a d&d rule book), because a moral agent must themselves be the source of the moral law that they then bind themselves to (despite any possible inclination--basically an emotion--moving them otherwise). Think about the difference between refraining from murder because you are ordered to, or because you don't want to be punished, and refraining from murder because you understand that murder is wrong.
**I think that Kant makes ( at least) two mistakes here. He underestimates the role that power plays in moral responsibility. Knowledge of a victims whereabouts is a sort of power, and if you give this to the murderer, knowing or strongly suspecting what they are going to do with this knowledge, you are aiding in the (potential) killing; you are willingly playing a role in an evil act, and so are culpable because you willingly marshal your resources in the name of an evil act. That is, you use your ability to affect your surroundings--by informing the killer of the whereabouts of your friend-- to an evil end. In this way, you are willing an evil act by knowingly increasing the likelihood that it will occur. This changes if you are not willing because then you are being used as a means and your will is then being undermined.
This seems to fail to take into consideration ones special duties to ones friends (not to mention other autonomous agents). It seems that not only would one have a ( negative)duty to not aid in their murder, one seems to have a positive duty to protect their friend. One can generalize a law that one ought to lie to protect those we have a special duty to protect. If this means that murders can't trust caretakers to help them murder, that's fine.
Yeah, I read that.
Mostly a blatant ripoff from the slightly earlier enûma eliš, which was a huge bestseller (if one can call it that) at the time in all Akkadian-speaking lands. Both enûma eliš and its later derivatives are quite rich in fantasy content, blame heavy drug use among practitioners of the scribe profession if you will, and also interwoven with various proclamations of contemporary legislation to make it even more confusing.
The unadulterated story is unwritten. The long-gone peoples that did know it had no need for writing - so grand were the expanses of their memory.
As it is, I'm not judgemental, and neither is the Goddess.
To explain how it is possible that this does not contradict any writings that would claim otherwise, I will follow in the vibes of our lamentation, and share a piece of psalm. An awfully corrupted variant, recorded by a guy called 'Asebh and accounted for as the 81st or 82nd of Psalms depending on edition, is included in the Jewish scriptures and their derivatives, and similarly awkward renditions can be found in many other writings of similar nature throughout the world.
Here it goes, sung in a way you might understand:
[they plead, cries upon the face of Earth]
Gods among deities, govern in your tribe
Malice reigns, why do you stay your hand
Lend your aid to the weakened, lend your aid to abandoned
Liberate them from the slavers' grasp
In blindness see they not nor discern calamity and plough
[we answer, from within, without and beyond]
Unto deities we said: your tribe is your own*
Surely you shall die like men, falling as their regents
Stand tall, deities, drivers of misfortune upon nations
*a more relevant word to be used here would refer to a 'sentiently self-governing thingy' but, unlike pre-Sumerian, English lacks nice poetic terms for stuff like that
Is that clear enough an explanation, or should I elaborate more?
That one gets me every time
Genesis 1 is really about an epic battle between Talos and Umberlee, isn't it?
What is winning?
Who won? Rawls. Rawls wins
So long as among the cosmological results of our universe-initializing intercourse (which physicists seem to have aptly termed the Big Bang) is the division between the equivalents of so-called Heaven, Earth, and typically omitted beyond, which really means a most basic differentiation upon the domain of the matter/non-matter/beyond para-axis, that's us. We don't really care what you call us, as we typically answer no calls. If anything, the stuff we've been named over the years is pretty entertaining.
Believe it or not, the already mentioned enûma eliš even goes as far as to call the both of us... water
Speaking of Greeks... wait, what? I did speak of Greeks, didn't I? Now, the Greeks recorded a plethora of variants of cognate mythologies, except they took a lot of liberty when shifting stuff around for it to match their singing habits. The introductory statement that everything is water or equivalent is notoriously absent from them, which is one reason why Aristoteles the Master of Blowing (flutes... mostly
I don't like to think of it, and you well shouldn't
unless you want Chaos to harass you in your dream. Enough... better get back to deities and their silly adventures.Now, there were many, many deities not accounted for in either of the mythological cultures discussed above. The total head count of deities was traditionally given as 70 which, for the ancients, basically meant 'a shitload'. The self-styled adon-ël (i.e. lord-of-god, for want of a better word) יהוה was among their number. If you want to credit anyone with the invention of propaganda, that'd be him. He adamantly claimed that his fellow kindred don't exist (which is why you won't find explicit records of their swashbuckling in Jewish scriptures, and only some vague mentions) and many people still believe that today, despite all the evidence, most notably the guy's own house being sacked at a posthumous order of his brother's. Admittedly, in his last centuries, he even kinda regretted and tried to stop what he'd done, the freak that he was, but it goes without saying that he had little understanding of social dynamics. Even if he had the grand internets of today at his disposal,
tweetingsaying 'I lied to you all, and the name of your adon-ël is not יהוה' would just unleash a huge shitstorm, and maybe give some fangirls a heart attack.As you may have noticed, I sometimes do יהוה impressions on these forums, which I hope are entertaining even to those who follow in his footsteps. I mean, he'd sure go livid if somebody mocked his using stone tablets as the preferred method of noting down his groceries, but that doesn't mean you have to. A slave driver's slave is a slave only so long as they adhere to that TRUTH. Sort of.
Need any more existential mysteries unravelled?
The world doesn't seem like a creation of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent Designer ( as opposed to propagator). Leibniz, noting that the creation reflects on the creator, insisted that this is the best of all possible worlds. Evil-- that which ought not be-- does not exist. Ought implies can, and this is just the best that can be done ( and so, we shouldn't expect better). Descartes couldn't stomach any limitation on--I guess יהוה's-- power, and so only put systemic deception outside of Their preview ( but apparently barred Them from making deception a metaphysical perfection).
As with most other things in the enlightenment, Kant did it best. His word-- well, it wasn't his word--for this chaos was noumena, and he noted the incoherence of defining 'it' positively. God, along with freedom of the will (and immorality*) are postulates necessary for action, even, as later commentators would note, the action of endorsing a belief (which renders the nihilism of even Leibniz and Descartes incoherent, if you think about it-- both lead to a sort of quietism). But these postulates are not knowable nor even definable (except negatively).
*This notion seems problematic as immorality implies temporality, and for Kant time is only a mode of human intuition/perception (i.e. it is 'added' by the mind in human perceptual representation)
Always
When righteous people suffer and wicked people flourish, we begin to ask why, says Neiman. We need not ask. Suffice to strip the sentence of judgemental terms like 'righteous' and 'wicked' to attain clarity on the matter.
But as the earlier psalm explained, neither I nor the Goddess would heed humankind's solemn pleas of miserere nobis. Such is the inner working of TRUTH that one can only deliver themselves from its shackles on their own. If we were to tell one to abandon their TRUTH, we'd only exchange one TRUTH for another. That is the way deities would go about it, as was within their limitations. We're not getting involved.
Mostly, we're not.
One could, of course, recall mythical stories telling that even in the sterile confines of a fortified and guarded gulag of יהוה's, a lone phallic-shaped snake aroused a slavewoman into rebellion
It is said the slave drivers had the rebels humiliated and led back into submission again a while later (many apocrypha recount that), but there became doubt, and there became questioning, in addition to the bewilderment of being exposed to this vast outside world.
If you can clearly pose any questions that trouble you in particular, I would hear them, as I find much amusement in exploring minds.
This itself implies a judgement.
And, in any case, we can describe the problem of evil without virtue terminology if that is what bothers you. That's just one way to understand it
But, i generally agree (I understand TRUTH here to be akin to what Kant referred to as Transcendental Realism)
Richard Moran notes that we often answer questions about our "inner states" with statements about 'the external world'. If i look out the window, and think, "It is raining", I have the answer to two questions:
Is it raining?
And
Do i believe that it is raining?
This doesn't work for other people. I wouldn't have the answer to the question, "does God think it is raining?", for example. Similarly, if you ask me, "do you believe that it is raining?" it is reasonable for me to look out the window to tell you the answer. I can take this question in at least three ways, and even all three ways simultaneously:
1. "Do you believe that it is raining". That is, among other things, are you disposed to answer questions like, "it is raining?" with affirming behaviors?
2. "Do you have good reasons for believing that it is raining available to you?" That is, is such a disposition warranted?
3. "Is it raining" That is, does this state of affairs obtain.
Though we can take this question as bring related to an "inner state", we don't necessarily look 'within ourselves', to our subjective states, to find the answer. Rather, we "look without", to the reasons we have available for or against the proposition itself, almost as though we take the question as normative:
4. "Should I believe that it is raining?"
Taken normatively in this way, it becomes clear that to answer this question, I have to look. I cannot just be a receptacle of information. This connects back to Kant, to authorship of moral law. I have to look because only I am responsible for my beliefs.
Plato thought that we could exit the cave, that we could "see things as they really are" with the help of clear thinking. But Kant recognized that we aren't surfacing, but spelunking, discovering what reason demands of the world.
Justice is one of those things. When we don't find it, we ask why. The reactionary response it to deny, in one way or another, what the world tells us: that justice does not exist in this world; that this world could be better*; that there is no casual relation between right action and reward ( or the reverse, between wrong action and punishment), etc etc etc.
The correct answer is that justice isn't here because we haven't created/implemented it yet
*btw, the problem of evil is also a threat to the existing power structure. Any supposed defence of God against the PoE is ultimately an attempt to deny the existence of evil, and ultimately is an attempt to legitimize this power structure. ( as does any philosophy that tries to deny the existence of evil in any form. Translated to politics, evil would be the illegitimate use of power.)
Last edit. Promise! XD