What Is Freedom? A Discussion On Hegelianism

[@estacoda545]

A really moving and inspiring discussion. Full enjoyed the whole thing.

[@tomam1290]

A great lecture, Antonio!

[@LibertarianLeninistRants]

my deepest condolences for your loss. the dog was cute :/

[@lain_os5385]

I thought it was kind of funny when you brought up Rudolf Steiner for a brief second. I personally felt that he held on to a very abstract understanding of freedom which also kind of leads him to his own kind of moral anti-realism. If you use moral laws ultimately restricting on freedom so he views the creator of morality as the individual.

[@lain_os5385]

Also >If everyone was violent then society wouldn't function I hope you're not viewing Kant as a consequentialist

[@lain_os5385]

Rudolf Steiner's ethical theory also gets really incoherent here. His moral anti-realism could not be anti-realist if it wants to stick to its own principles. Rudolf Steiner admits to the role that reason must play and so his ethical individualism if it must be rational cannot be individualistic. Reason by its nature is universal

[@luizhenrique5347]

Antonio, can you provide the automatic subtitles please?

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

It takes some days for that to be available.

[@luizhenrique5347]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy ok, thanks

[@TheSurpremeLogician]

A. W. Can I ask how is it that you derive ethics from this? Like how would you argue that “you shouldn’t steal from the homeless?”

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

The Concept as Idea shows the absolute form of Truth. Being which subsists approximates this form, and activities also approximate it. This comes near the Kantian moral form of self-coherence, where what is moral is what in absolute form does not self-destruct. Unlike regular philosophical thinking of this, Hegel's method allows an explication where amoral and nonethical considerations and judgments can be made concerning our understanding of an issue. Morality allows you to say you should not steal, but Hegel asks about why we should have property in the first place. Once that issue is solved (he shows a justification for property), it is not a matter of when it is ok to steal, but understanding the situation of any singular theft such that even if theft is generally unjustified, it can be understood in individual instances and judged accordingly.

[@TheSurpremeLogician]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy ok, so for Hegel, the Formula of Universal Law in Kant is inadequate for his system as it relates to ethics?

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

@@TheSurpremeLogician Yep.

[@TheSurpremeLogician]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy seems like Hegel would be implying some sort of threshold deontology.

[@orgate3953]

Yeah so I don't agree with this idea of animals habitats being "fit" for them. They can be put in positions that are just as painful and horrible as factory farms in nature when they are torn apart by predators or suffer horrible illnesses so if we're going by what an animal would experience in a wild habitat it seems arbitrary to exclude direct abuse and pain. I think animals are adapted to their environments so a good life for them often emulates their habitats to a certain degree which is why we'd have this intuition but only to the extent that the animal views that environment as desirable, and when you kill an animal you're making it undesirable for them even if prior to that moment you are treating them well.

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

Perhaps the phrasing was confusing, but what was meant by 'fit' is very broad: the natural condition of the animal. This is not about animals having well-being or happiness in Nature, but about their being in their properly natural condition. This is why Rain made the point that it seems to him more justified to hunt an animal in the wild, where they are generally in danger of predation anyway, as opposed to the unjustified factory farms which involve unnatural stresses imposed by us upon animals by ignoring their natural being and reducing them more towards objects.

[@orgate3953]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy Right but I'm making the point that their perfectly natural condition doesn't solve this issue of explaining our intuitions around animal ethics. Since in nature a predator will tear apart an animal without any concern for the pain it feels, often eating their prey and things like this which most people's intuitions would tell them is wrong even if they are fine with hunting. I think so as not to reduce them to objects it makes more sense to base our treatment of them on an understanding of what constitutes a good life for an animal and instead holding the understanding of the animals nature as a means to that end. I definitely agree that the inability of animals to limit their behaviour is very important to how we understand them in relation to ethics. For example we euthanise our dogs even if they bark and bite at us when we do it, for their own benefit since they cannot use their own reason to understand that the rest of their lives will be characterised by pain. Or even just giving them medicine or making them to through medical procedures to heal them they are incapable of understanding that the temporary pain is for their own good. The thing is we do the same thing with children, where we understand them as subjects but not rational subjects. I'd take an approach like Tom Regan here where I'd make a distinction between subjects as moral agents where they are capable of both recieving and giving rights, and moral patients where they are capable of recieving rights but not capable of giving rights.

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

@@orgate3953 Well, in Hegelian standpoint we do not base things on moral intuitions (which as we can see empirically are varied om thr same matters), nor can we base them on a one-sided relation of us deciding to privilege animals (right is not the term to use here) because we project moral worth onto them. You cannot be a moral patient without being a moral agent, recognition has to be mutual. Human children have rights because they will become moral agents in our communities, the kind of agents that can demand rights of their own account. The mentally lacking have no rights, but privileges, for it is we who advocate for them based on the ethical life of our communities. After all, the disabled are not aliens unknown to us, but come from us as family and community members, we have attachments to them. The point that hunting is ok because it is already part of the natural condition of animal life needs no justification other than natural life itself. To abstract animals concerning a 'good life' is mistaken-the life of Nature *is* the good life for animals. Nature does not treat individuals, but particulars and populations. So long as a species survives, that is the good of life. Why are we to try to fix what is not broken? What I think is that we severely mistake our own so-called moral intuition of animals, i.e. that we do not care or feel for them for the reasons we tell ourselves much in the same way we are confused about why we care about each other as human beings.

[@orgate3953]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy The reason I talked about moral intuitions was that they were brought up on the stream. I took it to be that you were using them not as a basis for ethical laws but as a prompt to examine our beliefs on ethics. Of course that could be the case and I could still be putting too much faith in them. In regards to recognition being mutual, when we as subjects appear to the animals, do animals not communicate their pain to us in their screams, do they not see us as monsters that are hurting them, monsters that we can then understand our selves to be, and be disatisfied with? Zizek put it like "What if this perplexity in the tortured animals gaze, is the perplexity aroused in monstrosity of the human being itself?". Once we understand in the animals eyes we can then develop ethical instituitons amongst ourselves to respect the animals subjectivity. The mutual recognition is between humans, not between the animals. With this in mind, I would say that it's not that we are seeking to correct some abstract notion of wrongness in nature, but understanding ourselves in relation to it. The rights of animals exist for us, not for the animals. I think hunting would almost be reducing people to abstract objects.

[@TheSurpremeLogician]

@@AntonioWolfphilosophy I’m pretty sure the philosophy of right in Hegel is concerned with legal rights, Antonio. So the disabled do have rights.

[@akiartz3008]

Thank you for your discussion. I was just thinking upon selfishness. I was mulling it over in my mind and I believe that selfishness and selflessness are two sides of the same coin. If you do something selfless you do it for selfish reasons, e.g. feeding the homeless to get gratification, or you do it for something selfish for selfless reasons, get gratification for feeding the homeless. You are withdrawing from yourself to other selves, selfless, and withdrawing from other selves to yourself, selfish. But I am assuming that all actions are a unity of selfishness and selflessness. I would even include economic exploitation under the unity as you are employing workers, selfless, and gaining a profit, selfish. But I guess the onus is then on what economic exploitation is. The unity is indifferent to what the action is, it is nonetheless that unity of selfishness and selflessness. I guess that is where the bad selfishness comes in, could you also have bad selflessness, self-destruction? But good or bad selfishness and selflessness wouldn't change the argument that all actions are the unity of selfish and selfless. But when people say that "you are JUST feeding the homeless for gratification," they emphasize the selfish and hiding the selfless forgetting, or not seeing, that all actions have that unity of selfishness and selflessness. If I knew what a self is I might think about this differently because, I think, you would need to be a self in order to be selfish or selfless. I would like to hear your thoughts on what I have wrote and Thank you again for the discussion.

[@AntonioWolfphilosophy]

There is good selfishness and bad selflessness, yes. To say all things are immediately selfish and selfless, however, is an abstraction where you are thinking with general universality and singularity. Bad selfishness is believing and acting with oneself as the essence and everyone else as contingent appearance. This leads to actions thay ignore the conditions of existence of the self, and so the individual destroys itself. Self-destruction of the bad selfishness is good, but would you call this the selfless or universal side of bad selfishness? You could, but it is a weird emphasis. Bad selflessness also destroys the individual, and this is nkt good either. You must not sacrifice others for your sake nor sacrifice yourself for their sake. If service to others is what one really wants to do. Then it is mo sacrifice, and not a problem.

[@estacoda545]

“A good person ought to be a lover of self, since he will both profit himself and benefit the others by performing beautiful actions.” - Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, Ch. VIII

[@ornature5324]

Seeing some heidegger similarities

[@antonharding8350]

about to share - copypaste