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Originally Posted by durkadurka33
You're in the minority here, actually. Nearly no philosophers are relativists, and it's FAR from obvious that your view on ethics is correct.
You'll find that you are also in the minority in being a libertarian. Not sure how that matters as the popularity of a line of thinking doesn't tell you much about whether it is correct. My ideas are a bit more popular with other groups of thinkers in academia.
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But in either case, you've completely misinterpreted my point. My claim is that without genuine choice, there are no normative concepts (right, wrong, good, bad, beautiful, ugly).
If you are claiming that there are no absolute, stand-alone normative concepts, you are correct.
However, right and wrong, good and bad, beauty and ugliness exist as human concepts. Freedom is not required. One can be ugly because of a shovel to the face. One can be good because of decent parenting and a well-functioning frontal lobe.
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But here's what you didn't grasp: I don't even think there's the concept of a DECISION without genuine choice (in the sense I've explicated at length ITT). So you can't say of someone's decision: That was a bad choice, NOT because ethics is relative, but because it makes no sense to make any normative claim without genuine choice (viz. free will). This, I think, is where the hard determinist and libertarians agree on all counts.
The decision making process still exists though. Determinism is not at all the same thing as knowing what will happen next.
People do make normative claims. These involve things such as character and some maleable behaviors. "That guy is a jerk" is a sensible claim, "stealing is wrong" is a sensible normative claim, and "you should be kind to strangers" is a sensible normative exhortation. None of those require that the jerk, thief or samaritan have ultimate freedom, only that their behavior is generated through internal processes rather than externally coerced.
That their internal clockwork was not self-created doesn't preclude sensible judgement about their value. It is silly to tell me that I should place equal value on a clock that doesn't tell time correctly as one that does.
Where we are in 100% agreement is that (given hard determinism) placing ultimate blame on someone for being ugly, bad or wrong is silly.
I'm not sure whether we agree on the following statements that I find completely consistent with HD: Noting that they are ugly, bad or wrong is not disallowed at all. Making value judgements on their relative beauty, goodness or rightness is as fine as making the same judgement on vegetables that are fresh or rotten. Punishment or praise (in the psychological sense) is also reasonable under many circumstances.
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It's the compatibilist who disagrees. The HD/Lib merely disagree over whether the determinist thesis is correct; compatibilists are a different story entirely.
Nah, we disagree over whether the free will thesis is correct.