So I've been reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and one of the issues that has come up with a central character is whether or not everything is permissible. Now out of the box I will say that this has a strong connection to religion and God (even within the book), but since one can do anything whether or not God exists, I'd like to at least start this question off in the broadest realm of Philosophy rather than Philosophy of Religion.
So, I guess to start off this discussion, "Is everything permissible?"
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~~~~~
No, everything is not permissible. You cannot defy the laws of physics, Jim.
Bad joke aside, there are certain things that just should not be done. Murder and rape are never permissible, as are several other heinous acts that should never be allowed. It doesn't matter if you are theoretically capable of doing them, you just flat shouldn't do them as a matter of honor, and failing that you kill anyone that does do those things or lock them up forever.
So, I guess to start off this discussion, "Is everything permissible?"
The way I see it, this question is essentially about the meaning of the word "permissible." And the problem is that things can't be permissible or impermissible in a vacuum. Grammatically speaking, there has to be a subject that permits or does not permit the given action, which is the object; we colloquially omit the inherent universal in saying "X is impermissible."
Thus, when someone says "X is permissible" what they really mean is that "All Y's permit X for some sufficiently large set of Y's."
This, I think, is the force of Dostoevsky's point in talking about permissibility. Permission is social in nature. There has to be someone around to deny you permission to do X, otherwise it is incoherent to say that you don't have permission. But he wants to push it all the way back to God, which is an erroneous move.
It doesn't require an omnipotent entity to render something impermissible. Any entity that is capable of restraining you suffices to deny you permission to do something. "The government doesn't permit murder," for instance, is a sentence that renders an act impermissible (at least for some people some of the time) even in a godless universe.
Then you might abstract by a step and say that nothing is universally impermissible in a Godless universe, but then of course the answer is that nothing is impermissible for God himself, and therefore nothing is universally impermissible even in a God-endowed universe. It's the usual regress; whoever lives at the apex of the power relation is immune from the exertion of power and therefore from the concept of permission.
Also note that, of course, permission is not morality. You can be permitted to do evil or forbidden from doing good.
I'm not very good at the whole filaphosizing, but I've tried to go off of this,
"You can do anything as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else."
- Obvious problems with... well can you hurt yourself?
- No matter what you do, you are hurting someone somewhere through your actions.
That said, I think this is a pretty good guideline.
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That may be a guideline, but morality is just based upon our society, culture and evolution. We can do anything.
So I've been reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and one of the issues that has come up with a central character is whether or not everything is permissible. Now out of the box I will say that this has a strong connection to religion and God (even within the book), but since one can do anything whether or not God exists, I'd like to at least start this question off in the broadest realm of Philosophy rather than Philosophy of Religion.
So, I guess to start off this discussion, "Is everything permissible?"
There would be no concepts of "should" and "permissible" in the first place were this the case.
I've not read that particular novel, but if it's anything like Crime and Punishment, the central character's going to run around trying to justify how he's allowed to do anything because he's so awesome and espouse nihilism for like 500 interminably long pages before he's eventually going to realize he's been a giant douche and repent.
Do you mean permissible as can be allowed, or permissible as morally correct? It's easy to create obtuse situations where you can say X is permissible to prevent Y, which is much worse, from happening.
It's impossible for everything to be right because then you descend into moral relativism which just doesn't work.
No, everything is not permissible. You cannot defy the laws of physics, Jim.
Yeah but scientist can defy the laws of philosophy.
So, I guess to start off this discussion, "Is everything permissible?"
Only when a society completely forsakes ideas of a transcendent law giver. I have no faith that anyone person will always do good when left to his own devices with no law or God to pass judgment on them.
Yeah but scientist can defy the laws of philosophy.
They can't and don't, science being a branch/outgrowth/child of philosophy. Though perhaps when you say "laws of philosophy" you mean something else...?
I have no faith that anyone person will always do good when left to his own devices with no law or God to pass judgment on them.
Being Christian, you have no faith that any one person will always do good with God there to pass judgment on them, either. We're all sinners, remember?
Also, note how other people on this thread are making the distinction between "permissible" and "moral".
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Well their is a great deal of them that think the universe can come into existence uncaused. You are a philosophy student maybe you have heard the maxim somewhere in your studies that whatever begins to exist needs a cause as explanation for its existence.
Faced with the evidence of a finite universe they are left to deny things like causality all in the hope of not believing in the inconvenient truth that God does exist.
Maybe we should start a new thread for such a conversation so that we do not hijack this one.
Being Christian, you have no faith that any one person will always do good with God there to pass judgment on them, either. We're all sinners, remember?
Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society.
Everything that CAN be done, can be done. In fact, based on recent news clips, many people are doing some rather horrible **** just because they can.
Not everything that can be done, SHOULD be done. This is were morality comes in.
As someone who doesn't believe in a Objective Morality, you may make the false assumption that I cannot condemn actions because some relativists use the "Oh, but it's not wrong in their culture, etc."
However, I do condemn actions all the time. Just because I believe that Morality is subjective, doesn't mean I cannot choose the one that I believe is the BEST one available. Even if the moral codes are subjective writ large - is no reason not to pick your favorite codes.
No, I do not support cultural relativism. I do NOT think other cultures who have different moral frameworks (i.e.Sharia Law) should be left alone to handle their own business. **** that, that cripples action based on the belief of what is right.
If we truly believe women should not be treated the way the are treated under Sharia Law for example, it is our duty and responsibility to go over there and get rid of the abuse. Is it not?
If we tie our hands with the cultural relativism nonsense, then we permit things we believe are wrong/evil to continue. THAT permission by inaction IS to me immoral.
Could this be seen as a form of moral tyranny? Maybe. But ask yourself. IS THIS WRONG? If the answer is YES. Doing nothing to stop it is immoral.
*Of course, I'm being immoral all the time as I am stuck here in Oregon barely making rent for my family instead of in the Sudan, or Darfur, or Syria, or Pakistan fighting injustice.*
Well their is a great deal of them that think the universe can come into existence uncaused. You are a philosophy student maybe you have heard the maxim somewhere in your studies that whatever begins to exist needs a cause as explanation for its existence.
Faced with the evidence of a finite universe they are left to deny things like causality all in the hope of not believing in the inconvenient truth that God does exist.
If GOD does NOT also violate causality - then where did he come from? What caused God? Or does he violate causality?
*classic pitfall trap Bakgat*
If your answer is "God is eternal and the laws of physics don't apply to him because he is outside the universe" then you have answered nothing in the most meaningless way possible, and I'd like some evidence to support your premise.
Maybe we should start a new thread for such a conversation so that we do not hijack this one.
There is already 3 of those, and you'd get the same :-/:rolleyes: from anyone who can think rationally.
Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society.
Oh yeah? What morality is that?
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“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
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Permission implies that somebody or something has the ability to stop you, or dissuade you by some means.
The question is absolutely meaningless without specifying context.
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If you say "in general", almost anything can be permissible or impermissible. If you're a new marine recruit it might be impermissible to eyeball or talk back to your drill sergeant. If you're a peasant in the middle ages, it might be impermissible to touch the King's body or clothing. And in both cases, consequences ensue if you dare to take the action.
I just don't see how you can imagine or discuss general purpose, universal, rules of "permissible" or "impermissible" outside of a context.
Did the OP have a context in mind even though it wasn't articulated? I suspect there was, since a question was posed.
Well their is a great deal of them that think the universe can come into existence uncaused. You are a philosophy student maybe you have heard the maxim somewhere in your studies that whatever begins to exist needs a cause as explanation for its existence.
Faced with the evidence of a finite universe they are left to deny things like causality all in the hope of not believing in the inconvenient truth that God does exist.
Maybe we should start a new thread for such a conversation so that we do not hijack this one.
Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society.
First of all, that doesn't make any sense. "Everybody sins, so God has to be there so that... everybody can still sin"? What's the point of that? Second, you are proposing Christianity as a solution to a problem that Christianity creates, like a doctor prescribing a drug for a disease that only he can diagnose. "Everybody's a sinner" is a Christian doctrine. If Christianity is not true, we have no reason to believe the propositions it asserts are true. And in a universe where this proposition is not established, we can entertain the possibility that some people might only do good, and strive to become those people. So far from creating the perfect society, Christianity in fact categorically asserts that it is impossible to do so. Christianity holds us back from morality.
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There are WAY to many interesting things to respond to in this thread, but I have to take a stab at this:
"Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society."
So, either things are good because god likes them, or god likes things because they are good. If things are good because god likes them, then it is completely arbitrary, in that they are deemed good solely because of a subjective evaluation and not on their own merits. Or, God likes things becasue they are good. In this case, God has nothing to do with what is good (it is outside his power). He has evaluated all of the options, and had reasons to pick what it good. In this case, it is for those reasons, and not gods will, what the good is, and therefore god supports a preexisiting good, and does not create the good. Thanks Plato (cf. Euthyphro).
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Also, everyone nees to stop being a semanticist. By permissable, he is using a predefined moral term, as in is X action morally permissable. Another way to phrase that, is X action allowable under a system of morality (please keep in mind that laws have nothing to do with morality). It has nothing to do with someone or something actually giving one permission to do something.
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When we say "X is permissible" it seems to me that the most likely meaning of this is something along the lines of "Action X has the property of permissibility" or "Action x lacks the property of wrongness" (or "Action x has the property of rightness" or "action x has the property of goodness" or "action x lacks the property of badness"). The exact semantic formulation doesn't matter too much, what matters is that it definitely seems to refer to some moral property. Moral properties themselves seem to be rather queer things, and probably don't exist; thus, all sentences about them refer to nonexistent things and are false.
So nothing is impermissible, but nothing is permissible either.
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That requires you to define impermissibility as something other than the absence of permissibility (or vice versa).
I'm not sure that it does. I was taking permissible and impermissible to be moral imperative terms that reference nonexistent properties and as such fail on their own right. Saying some action x is permissible naturally raises questions of who and why, as does saying action x is impermissible. You could reduce one to just being the absence of the other and nothing more, in which case yes that would apply. I'm not sure that's in line with normal moral semantics though.
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I was taking permissible and impermissible to be moral imperative terms that reference nonexistent properties and as such fail on their own right.
Yes, I got that. But the absence of a nonexistent property is an existent property. So if something is "permissible" in the absence of anything rendering it "impermissible", then if there are no moral properties then everything is permissible. (This, incidentally, seems to be something close to the conventional usage, as evinced by Dostoyevsky, Assassin's Creed, and this thread.) For both permissibility and impermissibility to be nonexistent something weird has to be going on in your definitions.
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Yes, I got that. But the absence of a nonexistent property is an existent property. So if something is "permissible" in the absence of anything rendering it "impermissible", then if there are no moral properties then everything is permissible. (This, incidentally, seems to be something close to the conventional usage, as evinced by Dostoyevsky, Assassin's Creed, and this thread.) For both permissibility and impermissibility to be nonexistent something weird has to be going on in your definitions.
I'd take imperatives, even open ones like "you may" to need an imperator, which is lacking if moral terms don't refer. It seems like we're really agreeing on the same *fundamentals* though, in that nothing is impermissible. I don't particularly like the usage of "permissible" for that (I don't think it's right to say the present king of france is bald because he doesn't have hair), but it's just a definitional problem.
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No human being will ever do something they deem is wrong. In order for a human to do anything they need to feel the pros outweigh the cons. Therefore, no human will ever do something they don't see as permissible.
No human being will ever do something they deem is wrong. In order for a human to do anything they need to feel the pros outweigh the cons. Therefore, no human will ever do something they don't see as permissible.
A couple of objections to this.
First, your premise rests on the assumption that all human action is rational, that we always weigh the pros and the cons before acting. But this of course is not true. We act on impulse all the time, and we may well believe that our impulsive actions are wrong. For example, a recovering alcoholic reaching for the bottle.
Second, your inference seems to require defining "permissible" to be equivalent to "the pros outweigh the cons". But this seems like a strange definition. Most people would say that it is perfectly permissible for me to get in my car and just drive around the block for five hours, even though the pros definitely do not outweigh the cons and so I do not actually do it. And most people would say that it is impermissible for me to commit the fabled "perfect murder", even though the pros may well outweigh the cons if I profit from it and I think I could never be caught. So when we talk about "permissibility", we seem to be talking about something else.
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I am not saying that they are correctly made decisions. Our mind is constantly making decisions whether concious or not. We are constantly thinking whether we realize our thought process or not. A person in an altered mental state is just doing a poor job at analyzing before it makes decisions.
If we decided to define "permissible" by society's standards than obviously things are impermissible. As a society the vast majority agree that things like murder is wrong. If things were not permissible in their own minds why would they allow themselves to do it.
I think it's based on the whole I don't want it done to me sort of thing. Sure people would want a world where you can do anything you want, but then you open up that possibility for everyone else. If someone's wants conflicts with yours then you end up breaking said world, since you restrict someone's desire to do what they want because it interferes with yours.
Everything is permissible, but to ensure some degree of order we surrender certain desires/wants to prevent total chaos (not an ideal world to live in).
So, I guess to start off this discussion, "Is everything permissible?"
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Bad joke aside, there are certain things that just should not be done. Murder and rape are never permissible, as are several other heinous acts that should never be allowed. It doesn't matter if you are theoretically capable of doing them, you just flat shouldn't do them as a matter of honor, and failing that you kill anyone that does do those things or lock them up forever.
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The way I see it, this question is essentially about the meaning of the word "permissible." And the problem is that things can't be permissible or impermissible in a vacuum. Grammatically speaking, there has to be a subject that permits or does not permit the given action, which is the object; we colloquially omit the inherent universal in saying "X is impermissible."
Thus, when someone says "X is permissible" what they really mean is that "All Y's permit X for some sufficiently large set of Y's."
This, I think, is the force of Dostoevsky's point in talking about permissibility. Permission is social in nature. There has to be someone around to deny you permission to do X, otherwise it is incoherent to say that you don't have permission. But he wants to push it all the way back to God, which is an erroneous move.
It doesn't require an omnipotent entity to render something impermissible. Any entity that is capable of restraining you suffices to deny you permission to do something. "The government doesn't permit murder," for instance, is a sentence that renders an act impermissible (at least for some people some of the time) even in a godless universe.
Then you might abstract by a step and say that nothing is universally impermissible in a Godless universe, but then of course the answer is that nothing is impermissible for God himself, and therefore nothing is universally impermissible even in a God-endowed universe. It's the usual regress; whoever lives at the apex of the power relation is immune from the exertion of power and therefore from the concept of permission.
Also note that, of course, permission is not morality. You can be permitted to do evil or forbidden from doing good.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
"You can do anything as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else."
- Obvious problems with... well can you hurt yourself?
- No matter what you do, you are hurting someone somewhere through your actions.
That said, I think this is a pretty good guideline.
---
That may be a guideline, but morality is just based upon our society, culture and evolution. We can do anything.
There would be no concepts of "should" and "permissible" in the first place were this the case.
I've not read that particular novel, but if it's anything like Crime and Punishment, the central character's going to run around trying to justify how he's allowed to do anything because he's so awesome and espouse nihilism for like 500 interminably long pages before he's eventually going to realize he's been a giant douche and repent.
Hopefully this novel's better.
It's impossible for everything to be right because then you descend into moral relativism which just doesn't work.
Yeah but scientist can defy the laws of philosophy.
Only when a society completely forsakes ideas of a transcendent law giver. I have no faith that anyone person will always do good when left to his own devices with no law or God to pass judgment on them.
They can't and don't, science being a branch/outgrowth/child of philosophy. Though perhaps when you say "laws of philosophy" you mean something else...?
Being Christian, you have no faith that any one person will always do good with God there to pass judgment on them, either. We're all sinners, remember?
Also, note how other people on this thread are making the distinction between "permissible" and "moral".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Well their is a great deal of them that think the universe can come into existence uncaused. You are a philosophy student maybe you have heard the maxim somewhere in your studies that whatever begins to exist needs a cause as explanation for its existence.
Faced with the evidence of a finite universe they are left to deny things like causality all in the hope of not believing in the inconvenient truth that God does exist.
Maybe we should start a new thread for such a conversation so that we do not hijack this one.
Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society.
Not everything that can be done, SHOULD be done. This is were morality comes in.
As someone who doesn't believe in a Objective Morality, you may make the false assumption that I cannot condemn actions because some relativists use the "Oh, but it's not wrong in their culture, etc."
However, I do condemn actions all the time. Just because I believe that Morality is subjective, doesn't mean I cannot choose the one that I believe is the BEST one available. Even if the moral codes are subjective writ large - is no reason not to pick your favorite codes.
No, I do not support cultural relativism. I do NOT think other cultures who have different moral frameworks (i.e.Sharia Law) should be left alone to handle their own business. **** that, that cripples action based on the belief of what is right.
If we truly believe women should not be treated the way the are treated under Sharia Law for example, it is our duty and responsibility to go over there and get rid of the abuse. Is it not?
If we tie our hands with the cultural relativism nonsense, then we permit things we believe are wrong/evil to continue. THAT permission by inaction IS to me immoral.
Could this be seen as a form of moral tyranny? Maybe. But ask yourself. IS THIS WRONG? If the answer is YES. Doing nothing to stop it is immoral.
*Of course, I'm being immoral all the time as I am stuck here in Oregon barely making rent for my family instead of in the Sudan, or Darfur, or Syria, or Pakistan fighting injustice.*
Current theories are that there is still a cause, fluxuations of antimatter etc. But WE DON'T YET KNOW WHAT REALLY HAPPENED < is a pretty honest and acceptable answer. Better answer than "God Did It!"
http://www.kurzweilai.net/forums/topic/biggest-breakthrough-in-100-yearsanti-matter-captured-cern
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070702084231.htm
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/before-big-bang.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
If GOD does NOT also violate causality - then where did he come from? What caused God? Or does he violate causality?
*classic pitfall trap Bakgat*
If your answer is "God is eternal and the laws of physics don't apply to him because he is outside the universe" then you have answered nothing in the most meaningless way possible, and I'd like some evidence to support your premise.
There is already 3 of those, and you'd get the same :-/:rolleyes: from anyone who can think rationally.
Oh yeah? What morality is that?
Thanks to Xenphire @ Inkfox for the amazing new sig
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
The question is absolutely meaningless without specifying context.
-
If you say "in general", almost anything can be permissible or impermissible. If you're a new marine recruit it might be impermissible to eyeball or talk back to your drill sergeant. If you're a peasant in the middle ages, it might be impermissible to touch the King's body or clothing. And in both cases, consequences ensue if you dare to take the action.
I just don't see how you can imagine or discuss general purpose, universal, rules of "permissible" or "impermissible" outside of a context.
Did the OP have a context in mind even though it wasn't articulated? I suspect there was, since a question was posed.
Okay.
First of all, that doesn't make any sense. "Everybody sins, so God has to be there so that... everybody can still sin"? What's the point of that? Second, you are proposing Christianity as a solution to a problem that Christianity creates, like a doctor prescribing a drug for a disease that only he can diagnose. "Everybody's a sinner" is a Christian doctrine. If Christianity is not true, we have no reason to believe the propositions it asserts are true. And in a universe where this proposition is not established, we can entertain the possibility that some people might only do good, and strive to become those people. So far from creating the perfect society, Christianity in fact categorically asserts that it is impossible to do so. Christianity holds us back from morality.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
"Yes I do remember and that is why I think Gods morality is critical to a good society."
So, either things are good because god likes them, or god likes things because they are good. If things are good because god likes them, then it is completely arbitrary, in that they are deemed good solely because of a subjective evaluation and not on their own merits. Or, God likes things becasue they are good. In this case, God has nothing to do with what is good (it is outside his power). He has evaluated all of the options, and had reasons to pick what it good. In this case, it is for those reasons, and not gods will, what the good is, and therefore god supports a preexisiting good, and does not create the good. Thanks Plato (cf. Euthyphro).
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So nothing is impermissible, but nothing is permissible either.
That requires you to define impermissibility as something other than the absence of permissibility (or vice versa).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'm not sure that it does. I was taking permissible and impermissible to be moral imperative terms that reference nonexistent properties and as such fail on their own right. Saying some action x is permissible naturally raises questions of who and why, as does saying action x is impermissible. You could reduce one to just being the absence of the other and nothing more, in which case yes that would apply. I'm not sure that's in line with normal moral semantics though.
Yes, I got that. But the absence of a nonexistent property is an existent property. So if something is "permissible" in the absence of anything rendering it "impermissible", then if there are no moral properties then everything is permissible. (This, incidentally, seems to be something close to the conventional usage, as evinced by Dostoyevsky, Assassin's Creed, and this thread.) For both permissibility and impermissibility to be nonexistent something weird has to be going on in your definitions.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'd take imperatives, even open ones like "you may" to need an imperator, which is lacking if moral terms don't refer. It seems like we're really agreeing on the same *fundamentals* though, in that nothing is impermissible. I don't particularly like the usage of "permissible" for that (I don't think it's right to say the present king of france is bald because he doesn't have hair), but it's just a definitional problem.
A couple of objections to this.
First, your premise rests on the assumption that all human action is rational, that we always weigh the pros and the cons before acting. But this of course is not true. We act on impulse all the time, and we may well believe that our impulsive actions are wrong. For example, a recovering alcoholic reaching for the bottle.
Second, your inference seems to require defining "permissible" to be equivalent to "the pros outweigh the cons". But this seems like a strange definition. Most people would say that it is perfectly permissible for me to get in my car and just drive around the block for five hours, even though the pros definitely do not outweigh the cons and so I do not actually do it. And most people would say that it is impermissible for me to commit the fabled "perfect murder", even though the pros may well outweigh the cons if I profit from it and I think I could never be caught. So when we talk about "permissibility", we seem to be talking about something else.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
If we decided to define "permissible" by society's standards than obviously things are impermissible. As a society the vast majority agree that things like murder is wrong. If things were not permissible in their own minds why would they allow themselves to do it.
Everything is permissible, but to ensure some degree of order we surrender certain desires/wants to prevent total chaos (not an ideal world to live in).
Moral permissibility is no more "magical" than that. Morality proceeds from the values of things with preferences.