The deontology of morals

In moral philosophy, deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty"^[ is the normative ethical position that judges the morality of an action based on rules.

It is sometimes described as "duty-" or "obligation-" or "rule-" based ethics, because rules "bind you to your duty".

Deontological ethics is commonly contrasted to consequentialism, virtue ethics, and pragmatic ethics. In this terminology, action is more important than the consequences.

"the knowledge of what is right and proper"

Depending on the system of deontological ethics under consideration, a moral obligation may arise from an external or internal source, such as a set of rules inherent to the universe (ethical naturalism), religious law, or a set of personal or cultural values (any of which may be in conflict with personal desires).

Deontology is the study of that which is an "obligation or duty", and consequent moral judgment on the actor on whether he or she has complied.^{[citation needed]} In philosophy and religion, states Bocheński, there is an important distinction between deontic and epistemic authority.^[6] A typical example of epistemic authority, explains Anna Brożek, is "the relation of a teacher to his students; a typical example of deontic authority is the relation between an employer and his employee".^[7] A teacher has epistemic authority when making declarative sentences that the student presumes is reliable knowledge and appropriate but feels no obligation to accept or obey; in contrast, an employer has deontic authority in the act of issuing an order that the employee is obliged to accept and obey regardless of its reliability or appropriateness.

Can we derive ought from ís? Yes. we can

From the perspective of neuroscience and brain evolution, the routine rejection of scientific approaches to moral behaviour based on Hume’s warning against deriving ought from is seems unfortunate, especially as the warning is limited to deductive inferences.
The dictum can be set aside for a deeper, albeit programmatic, neurobiological perspective on what reasoning and problem-solving are, how social navigation works, how evaluation is accomplished by nervous systems, and how mammalian brains make decisions.
“
”— Patricia Churchland in her book Braintrust (emphasis added)

We are in the terrain vague of our sexual life

This is the terrain vague of our sexual life, the habitat of eros. Science has failed to frame this subtle carnivore of sexual desire.  The Utopian vision of sexual liberation has degenerated in practice into a set of hedonistic precepts that hardly constitute a moral system at all. 

Pornographic pop music and cultural pauperisation.

I write as if I resided in the days when disapproval was permitted.

I go to the gym, the pop music blares out, the words pornographic, the rap and I accept one is in a culutre trapped in a culture of near-total inarticulateness...I swear to God...If I hear one more 

strangulated cry blaring out...

‘

Populism is a frontier sensibility

ALL fame IS An OBITUARY and form of OBSOLENCE

Democrats like patients deserted by their psychoanalyst in the middle of analysis.

Democrats and Liberal you need to accommodate the spritely Ariel and worldly Prospero,  or some mixture of the two. There is a humane pessimism that runs throughout the left, but no immense sense of the fragility of their moral claims  as it is pursued precariously under the sway of powers they or we,  cannot comprehend: 

the Youth culture egged on by their pornographic  pop music  is a global force, propagated through media which acknowledge neither locality nor sovereignty in their easy-going capture of the airwaves: ‘one world one music’ – in the slogan adopted by MTV, a station [sic] which assembles the words, images and sounds which are the lingua franca of modern adolescents.

Is Trump too verbose to be memorable?

You pull the blinds and think

a conscious effort is required to acquire  a reputation

Shall I vote for that man (Trump) who is a being several sizes larger than life

but too verbose to be memorable.

Brexiteers sare not xenophobes, bigots, et al, in the US 'deplorables',,,they are Democrats

In the UK those who voted to leave the EU and its unelected bureaucrats
ARE NOT RACISTS, xenophobes bigots and other ad hominens employed by the oh so moral left, point: to the Liberals a repugnance for your nation is not a stance 
against xenophobia but an arrogant refusal to be like other people.
The homeopathy type mockery the left indulge is weak and self indulgent

Do you ever feel you want to reproach the night

You are alone, in the depths of the night, you can't sleep, you feel the night has you rope and tied,
some companion, so you reproach the night for its lack of  discomforting light, for no bed fellow is s/he.

The 'progressives' will stop at nothing

If it came to a civil war in America because of Trump hatred, one can imagine in worst case scenario the ''resist'movement, with their purposive frivolity,  of their secular religion, with their PRISSY EUPHEMISMs believing in their moral fecklesness their pronouncements were of OLYMPIAn RATIONALITY, their hearts beating rapidly with their invisible furies concealed on a roof and shooting at their best friend, who had declared himself, after undergoing a Yeatsian change of mind, and had abandoned progressive frivolity and declared her/him self to  be on the other 'Trump' side.

‘Talking to Myself’. ‘I’m always amazed at how little I know You,

 ‘Talking to Myself’. ‘I’m always amazed at how little I know You,’ Auden says to himself in that last poem

Comey aspiring to be an angel

The Mueller inquiry and Kafka's Trial

The real trial is the constant process rather than the trial itself
Someone  must have been telling lies about Josef K.’ We never find out whether or not the opening line of The Trial is true, or what the lies might have been. Instead we are led into a suffocating world of innuendo and gossip, which slowly builds towards a judicial decision that doesn’t in the end arrive. Unable to discover what he’s been accused of, Josef K focuses on trying to navigate a system that is as senseless as it is cruel, ultimately without success. The world portrayed in The Trial is one in which judiciary and bureaucracy have collapsed into each other. The intimidating symbolism of the courtroom is married to the pettiness and absurdity of bureaucracy, creating a web that traps the book’s hero for no clear reason. It isn’t so much that he is suffering an injustice, as that he can barely work out what the justice system wants of him or how he might provide it. The real trial is the constant process, rather than the hearing itself.
What we get is PRISSY EUPHEMISM under the guise of OLYMPIA RATIONALITY

‘Words are for those with promises to keep'

The group now referred to as the 'talkers' are the media pack, journalists experts et al

as the poet Auden proclaimed  ‘Words are for those with promises to keep'

Are poets unacknowledged legislators of the world’, or the secret police?

Are poets, as Shelly suggested,  the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, or the secret police?
no, the secret police are journalists say in the UK the Guardian and in the US the New York Times

Looking pleased when caught giving

like feeding strays or looking pleased when caught

The Mueller inquiry a melody that will never find its words

Some melodies are never meant to find their words in the hearts of Democratic invisible furieseven after the lenghty   Mueller inquiry and in the seismic intellectual commotion of   a dozenpartisan lawyers, like apostles to Mueller that craggy faced who reminds one visually of Auden

Democrats should think of reforming rather than deforming (impeachment) Trump., the lesson of the gate.

"In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. 

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. 

The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer:

 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"

We do not live in the best of all possible worlds, he reminds us, but the best of all impossible worlds. 

Think of  the foolishness of wisdom and the wisdom of foolishness to be found in the plays of Shakespeare. Yet few have used the power of paradox more effectively than Chesterton, whose works and whose very life encapsulated the paradox, embodied in the character of his delightful priest detective Father Brown, that wisdom can only be found in innocence

Chesterton and paradox

Caricature of Chesterton, by Max Beerbohm

Chesterton loved to debate, often engaging in friendly public disputes with such men as George Bernard Shaw,^[16] H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow.^[17][18] According to his autobiography, he and Shaw played cowboys in a silent film that was never released.^[19]

Visual wit[edit]

Chesterton was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 m) and weighing around 20 stone 6 pounds (130 kg; 286 lb). His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote

During the First World War a lady in London asked why he was not "out at the Front"; he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am."^[20] On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it."^[21] P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like G. K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin".^[22]. 

12 Step America a new established Chruch

The disciplines of the 12-step group America, where there is no established church, abounds in its simplistic nonsense

Your úr''self

Your úr' self ', is the primitive, original, earliest version of you

the German psychiatrist Georg Groddeck, considered disease, bodily appearance, even apparent accidents to be psychosomatic expressions of an ur-self, 

the ‘It’ that secretly led your life for you: so that, say, a sore throat was a symptom of telling fibs (‘the liar’s quinsy’) and cancer the result of suppressing your imagination or animal spirits.

Well that an  opinion and all theories are opinions

The redundancy of Art, and its 'moral' efficacy

 Auden (the poet) grew increasingly vehement as he aged about the complete redundancy of art as an influence on people or society: it became a favourite bit of table talk to assert that ‘the arts can do nothing’ and that ‘the social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al had never lived.’ That is a startling counterfactual to insist on quite so absolutley -   a pretty punishing crit of 'the moral efficacy of Art

‘The more we love the Arts … the more careful we must be not to overestimate their importance

That knock on the door in the dead of night

There was a time when it would have been a big deal that a lawyer for the president compared American law officers to Nazis. Unfortunately, in the Trump era, Rudy Giuliani’s reference to F.B.I. agents as “storm troopers,”made last week during a television interview, will be forgotten in days.' Sp said the New York Times.

How would you the NYT, describe a knock on the door in the dead of night? Strange men enter your house your wife is terrified, your children are screaming....to sideline it as the 'law' at its finest
is to not address the matter.  Such behaviour by 'law' enforcement officers
conjectures an image in any right minded person, I would have said Kafka however Guiliani's reference  is not far off  the mark and is an association that many would make.  More relevant is who instigates such behaviour, could it be
greedy, partisan, make a name for themselves lawyers? (Mueller team), yes I will get that 11 bedroomed house out of this if its the last thing I do, thank you taxpayers.

'Truth' is just not much fun, is it?

If we think of the  quotidianess of lived life, the  trouble with it is  its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity,  What that usually boils down to is a belief in the superior veracity of fiction: that you can tell more of the truth about more of life by making things up, an accusing finger could be pointed at both Trump and the media's onslaught against him
In Rortyian (Richrd Rorty) terms, it’s a commitment to the idea that the kinds of sentence used in fiction do more and more important work than other sorts of 'truthful' sentences.

For journalists then 'Truth'  is likely to be less artistic, less considered and in the larger sense less truthful .  On the other hand  journalism does have going for it the very considerable glamour and appearance of fact, as  if like medieval monks the had been labouring over their parchment  with devoted restraint.. Subsequently the truth about Trump  is all the more menacing because it is strictly implicit rather than boringly explicit.  Think the Mueller inquiry after two years
it seethes and meanders along implicitly implying Trump guilt but refrains from naming him explicitly.  Well, 'truth' is just not much fun,is it?

dOES jEAN CLAUDE jUNCKER SUFFER FROM 'BASOREXIA'?

#

bASOREXIA IS A CONTROLLABLE URGE TO KISS 

The UK was once the the America of the Germans

Alan Macfarlane's excellent work suggests that our tradition of ordered liberty emerged with the Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany. In the wise words of Benjamin Franklin, "Britain was formerly the America of the Germans."

society is ‘a partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’

Edmund Burke.  argues‘that a society is ‘a partnership… between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’

Your view depends on which Church you have been programmed to attend

Historically rampant sexuality (the 60s) does not enhance public health, causing a spike in sexually transmitted diseases, 'let it all hang out' has seen its day. Abstinence, amongst other behaviour guidelines undergirds Conservative philosophy just as advocations for a more 'free' and 'open' society undergirds the Liberal cause. One's views depends on which Church you have been programmed to attend.

Can science resolve morals?

From the perspective of neuroscience and brain evolution, the routine rejection of scientific approaches to moral behavior based on Hume’s warning against deriving ought from is seems unfortunate, especially as the warning is limited to deductive inferences. The dictum can be set aside for a deeper, albeit programmatic, neurobiological perspective on what reasoning and problem-solving are, how social navigation works, how evaluation is accomplished by nervous systems, and how mammalian brains make decisions.

Is it too Brexit, too Trump to feel attached to one's land?

Is it too Brexit, too Trump,  indeed too white..to be attached to ones land to admit that you have 

a sense of belonging to a place where childhood memories we formed to be attached to the place where you were born, or should you not look back and not belong to any place but belong to the world, (the reductio ad abasurdum of Marxist egalitarianism) but leaving such no borders tendentious drivel aside should one 'Not look back' like Lott did

she glanced back and was turned into stone. But then I was never too keen on myths

What NOT to say in an Obituary

What not to say in an Obituary

PC

...she was definitely not  a high class prostitute, well, not in my opinion
but she did have  an uncompromisingly direct way with the opposite sex
 she believed in 'hands on' mentoring with her junior male colleagues
later in life she was unduly active in community affairs, some called her a busybody
because did have a hand in every pie, to call her a Liberal would not do her justice she was further to the left than a salad fork,  she liked to swim au naturel in the sea emerging shivering to the odd gasps from
a pensioner or two, to say any sea that not induce hypothermia is not worth its salt.
he had the insouciant charm of those blessed with extroidinary privilege She was full of

squirty litle aside worth of Wooster, she was a true blazer and and will be sorely missed.

.

Falling barometers are regularly followed by storms, but do not cause them

Falling barometers are regularly followed by storms, but do not cause them

It is often said that pains cause withdrawals of affected parts of the body. In extreme cases, however — for example in a case of touching a hot stove — it can be observed that the affected part is withdrawn before the pain is felt

Nietzsche on our claim that we have 'free will'

Against the Free Will Thesis, Nietzsche argues that a free agent (that is, one sufficiently free to be morally responsible) would have to be causa sui (i.e., self-caused, or the cause of itself); but since we are not causa sui, no one can be a free agent. Nietzsche takes for granted — not implausibly — that our moral and religious traditions are incompatibilist at their core: causally determined wills are not free wills.

desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense…the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and…to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness. (BGE 21)

But we cannot, needless to say, pull ourselves up “out of the swamps of nothingness,” and so we cannot have ultimate responsibility for our actions.

This explanation of a person's moral beliefs in terms of psycho-physical facts about the person is a recurring theme in Nietzsche. “[M]oralities are…merely a sign language of the affects” 

 “Moral judgments,” he says are, “symptoms and sign languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure” (WP 258). “[O]ur moral judgments and evaluations…are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us” (D 119), so that “it is always necessary to draw forth…the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices” (D 542). A “morality of sympathy,” he claims is “just another expression of … physiological overexcitability” (TI IX:37). Ressentiment — and the morality that grows out of it — he attributes to an “actual physiological cause [Ursache]” (G

Propositional contents would make them appear to be causally connected to the action are, in fact, epiphenomenal

The “inner world” is full of phantoms…: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either — it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness — something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them….

What follows from this? There are no mental [geistigen] causes at all

Nietzsche. “[B]y far the greatest part of our spirit's activity,” says Nietzsche, “remains unconscious and unfelt”

es, Nietzsche's strongest targeted argument for the epiphenomenality of consciousness depends on a piece of phenomenology, namely, “that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish” 
Epiphenomenalism is the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events. Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs.

Huxley (1874), who held the view, compared mental events to a steam whistle that contributes nothing to the work of a locomotive. James (1879), who rejected the view, characterized epiphenomenalists' mental events as not affecting the brain activity that produces them “any more than a shadow reacts upon the steps of the traveller whom it accompanies”.

Nietzsche on our 'herd' morality

Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality,” says Nietzsche, “in other words…merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, 

He attacks morality both for its commitment to untenable descriptive (metaphysical and empirical) claims about human agency, as well as for the deleterious impact of its distinctive norms and values
 Nietzsche aims at freeing higher human beings from their false consciousness about morality (their false belief that this morality is good for them), not at a transformation of society at large


Presuppose that “morality” has universal applicability and is claims  stubbornly and inexorably, ‘I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality

Ever been criticized for you inerpretation of a book?

Ever been criticized for you interpretation of a book, I have  
but then I have always been puzzled by the vertiginous and conflicting possibilities of allegorical and non-allegorical interpretation of others.  So there!

The White House Correspondents dinner was like the Huns gathering at the river Don

and there was dung, the comedian,  among the gazelles (Sanders, Conway)

Does Christ have two natures, one human, one divine?

Does Christ have two natures, one human, one divine, or one compound nature? How can one possibly understand the side-by-side of divinity and humanity in a single substance

On being as blinkered as the Iranian Mullahs

So, it's hats off to Trump again (North Korea) for nosing out another Obama dud (you have to be really educated (Harvard) to be that naive. Although it must deeply painful for the Liberal intelligentsia and half the US population to accord any merit to the Donald, there is something about street nous  (Trump types) that engages with the 'real'  world, whereas an apprentice ship in Community Service followed by a good finishing school like Harvard  blinkers one to the  'real world'.  One emerges believing  one is now primed for the real world but one has been blinkered by one's (sorry for the blitz of 'ones' it is due to an English education)
so 'one' is partially lobotomised by one's mentors the 'talkers', the tenured hermeunetes so one is
constrained in the 'experts'  ideology, not unlike....eh well, the Iranian Mullahs?

The legal sitting on the fence called 'neutrality'.

C

Contrarian

England1h ago

'We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, ...and neutral.' There is no such human state as neutral. Our car goes into neutral but it is not neutral it is actively idling. A neutral zone would leave the Law sitting on the fence
The article quotes: ’They changed the rules for F.B.I. investigations'; well, hasn’t that stood the test of time?
'“What’s not O.K. is for the White House, and especially the President, to have any involvement with criminal prosecutions.' Yet conversely it is perfectly acceptable for legal minds, factually Trump haters, at vast taxpayers expense to pathologically pursue Trump associate with the knock on the door in the dead of night tactic; now what does that remind you of? Kafka or Hitler?

‘As to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton’ so you have already decided that it is baseless, without due process, (I think that is the legal term. no lawyer me, thank God).

A neutral state it is an asinine claim, there is no hill outside language where we can stand on and silently observe it (language} in our neutral state, for even though we are silent (supposedly neutral) we are still thinking in language, indeed the argument goes that language is fascistic.
If one wanted to get all Wittgensteinian ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it’ and the context in which you say it. I should be lecturing at Journalism school, (Joke) Well, at least I am not neutral. Nor is Mr Leonhardt who judging by this piece is wholly partisan.

In the US only one side tell lies

Why do Hillary Clinton 's supporters accept her lies, email etc
is it because if you are on the left and up pops one of the 'talking
classes' or, tenured hermeneute or secular priest to assure you
that there is only one side who tell lies...and that it is those, I can hardly get the words out of my mouth....those...
deplorable types.

It is too easy to call Trump names

'Trump was incredulous of his own comment, notable from the way he began to smirk as he mouthed the words...It wasn’t sincerity but sarcasm. It was a way of making a point, not about jealousy but about resentment.'
My goodness you draw a great deal from a facial idiosyncrasy it is almost 'Comeyesque' in remembered detail and as it was some time ago, Proustian in its recall.
Name calling is so easy, Trump is a 'bufoon' what school of buffoonery do you think he emanates from the Italian school or the French school of buffoonery?  I hear they are as different as red and blue.  One is well advised to look up the etymology of words especially before employing them as an insult.

There is not such a thing as neutral

'We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, can be effective, can be nonpartisan and neutral.' There is no such human state as neutral. Our car goes into neutral but it is not neutral it is actively idling.  A neutral zone would leave the Law sitting on the fenceThe article quotes: ’They changed the rules for F.B.I. investigations'; well, hasn’t that stood the test of time?
'“What’s not O.K. is for the White House, and especially the President, to have any involvement with criminal prosecutions. That really turns the rule of law on its head.”  Yet conversely it is perfectly acceptable for legal minds, factually Trump haters,  at vast taxpayers expense to pathologically pursue Trump associate with the knock on the door in the dead of night tactic; now what does that remind you of?  Kafka or Hitler?
  ‘They allowed uncomfortable investigations to proceed unimpeded.’  But Trump has been subject to 2 years of bogus investigation, like being infected by a virus.
 ‘As to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton’  so you have already decided that it is baseless, without due process, (I think that is the legal term. no lawyer me, thank God). A neutral state it is an asinine claim, there is no hill outside language where we can stand on and silently observe it in our neutral state, for even though we are silent (supposedly neutral) we are still thinking in language, indeed the argument goes that language is fascistic.
If one wanted to get all Wittgensteinian ‘ It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it’ and the context in which you say it.  I should be lecturing at Journalism school, (Joke) Well, at least I am not neutral.

The joke that only Trump is a 'porky pier' (liar)

Contrarian

England | Pending Approval

In an attempt at balance, one might ask, why does Hillary Clinton's supporters accept her lies, email etc? If there is no compare and contrast in an article then there is the danger of solipsism. But if you are on the left balance is not necessary, because if you are on the elite end of the spectrum and up pops one of the 'talking classes' or, tenured hermeunete, or secular priests or whatever, to assure you that there is only one side who tells lies...and that it is those, I can hardly get the words out of my mouth....those... deplorable Trump types. Yes, they naively buy into Trump's 'porky pies' (Cockney rhyming slang for 'lies') where as we on the increasingly secular religious left, at least we have a mission, 'resist' and in that mission there is only one side to be seen, so a faux psychiatric anti Trump polemic that will explain to us how those poor naive people consume lies is gullibly gorged without a mention of what 'our' side do. Pace Derrida, one has to ask, what benefit; what seductive or intimidating bonus do we derive from this article? What social or political advantage does the writer want to cause Does the journalist want to cause fear, or pleasure? To whom and how does he want to cause discomfort. With his faux psychology does he want to inflame with his lofty proclamations? One can only conclude the aim is to further divide, and to divide further a nation already riven by partisan views. Don't take any notice of this comment I was only joking