I'm causing people to associate emotions with things. That's the manipulation. If I want to convince someone that stealing is bad, I'll cause them to associate negative feelings with the concept of stealing. Empathy is useful in that regard.
What if you appeal to emotions they have already associated? They have already associated insecurity with fear, and you are simply providing a way to assuage their fear by providing security. You're just an entrepreneur.
Let's say an argument has five premises. If we evaluate those premises and find that two of them are false does that make the argument more reasonable than if four premises turn out to be false? I say the whole thing falls apart either way.
I think it could be more reasonable. Surely you believe that some premises are stronger and some are weaker, and that it's not simply a matter of binary truth and falsity? This is pretty important in the moral realm where you are required to balance competing interests, such as liberty, equality, productivity, safety, etc.
It also comes up when you are comparing two arguments that seem to be sound but have contradictory conclusions. Suppose you either can't or don't have time to ferret out falsity. How would you weigh the two conclusions against one another? Hopefully by the strength of the premises and inferences. You can even see this in systems. For example, in the way that General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics contradict each other, and yet each system seems sound.
No. There are lots of things that I want to do that you would say I "shouldn't" do.
Well you've never been very interested in following my moral authority.
No, the question is whether
you ought to do what
you desire. Granted, "desire" is an ambiguous term in that it could be applied to the sense appetite or the intellectual appetite (we have spontaneous sexual desires as well as highly robust and thought-out intellectual desires). I think you have to deal with the more difficult intellectual desire if you want to sweep away all desire as normative. Certainly I don't think we should act on every small bodily or emotional inclination.
He'll be happier if he chooses the blue car. C'mon... Did you really think I was just going to say "should"? In common parlance I probably would say "should" because then I wouldn't care about being accurate.
Haha, I'm not trying to trick you. I want you to actually think about whether he should. What's the difference between saying you want and saying you should get? It seems to me that the only difference is ability. If we want something and we have the ability to get it then we will get it. The concept of "wanting" is already normative; the "should" is already built in.
Happiness is also intrinsically normative. You basically said, "He should get it," but with different normative language. If you convince someone that something will make them happier, then you've already convinced them that they should get it.
That's what makes conversations with me interesting! Too many discussions around here are crafted from the same boilerplate responses being batted back and forth. Philo doesn't like to argue, so I was giving him space to explain his thoughts, but he seems to be bored with that too. That's why I went back on the prowl. Rrawr!
No, I agree that questioning whether you should eat the hamburger you want to eat isn't "boilerplate." In fact it's downright nonconformist.
Believing what's true and doing what you desire often find themselves at odds, and I think that conflict illustrates the problem with what you've said here.
Well why
should truth and desire be consistent with one another!?
Say more, though.
Opposable thumbs point to the existence of things that we can grasp, sure. And moral values point to the existence of things that we can value. So what?
So perhaps the universally held value is universal because it is grounded in objective realities. That would explain a whole lot.
I pulled these two out of order because this is where I concede a little. I asked myself the "why is this good?" questions till I got to the bottom and happiness is one step up. Happiness is a state of pleasure being obtained, so I won't agree that happiness is the intrinsically desirable thing, but I will say that pleasure might be. That sensation we experience when dopamine is released in the brain, why is that desirable? Why does it feel good? It's that sensation that we associate with eating, and sex, and socializing, and robbing and pillaging, and knitting... We want to do these things because doing them gives us that sensation. Why do we like that sensation? I dunno.
First, I'm not so sure about robbing and pillaging in relation to dopamine, but I suppose adrenaline is similar. Second, happiness is a broader concept than mere sense pleasure. Pleasure can cause happiness, but so can other things. "
For Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 1) that some held man's last end to consist in four things, viz. 'in pleasure, repose, the gifts of nature, and virtue.'" Happiness isn't just pleasure and it isn't just a drug. As Aquinas says, happiness is acquiring your true goal or goals. For example, if you are working all day and are looking forward to reclining and taking a nap, the attainment of that repose will bring with it happiness even without your dopamine.
But I still don't see that filling in the gaps. Even granting the intrinsicality* of pleasure, there's still an opening between "I should desire this" and "I should fulfill that desire".
I think you meant to say that there is an opening between "I desire this" and "I should fulfill this desire." Sort of. First, are we agreed that there is no opening between "This is true," and "I should believe this"? And between "This will make me happy," and "I should seek this"? I don't think there is any opening between those, which gets at some of the previous comments.
Regarding desire, you're right that there is a gap between desiring and acting on that desire (to try to satisfy it). We can deliberate about whether the desire is worth pursuing, and also about how to pursue it, but desire itself is intrinsically ordered towards fulfillment. To put it succinctly: unfulfilled desire is bad. That doesn't mean we should fulfill every desire, for we have competing goals and desires. Buddhists even desire to be rid of all desire, paradoxically enough.
But post-deliberation desires--intellectual desires--are the sorts of things that we really should try to fulfill. Or better put, they are the things that we really do try to fulfill. I don't say that you should try to fulfill every desire, but I say that you do try to fulfill your very highest desires. I don't think there is any "gap" or "opening" with the normativity regarding our highest desires.
It's also worth noting that happiness and desire are very closely related. Happiness is, by definition, what all men desire. If something will make us happy then it is desirable and we should pursue it. It is also
good. This begins to bring us full-circle to my
first post (I think Philo's biggest mistake was identifying goodness with functionality).