Hi, everyone.

My name's Ben, and I've been lured here 'cause I'm a friend of JInksy's from university in Melbourne.

I live in Sydney at the moment where I'm the editor at a major think tank, but am returning home to Melbourne this December for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being that I just don't like Sydney very much. Not completely sure what I'll end up doing there, or how long I'll stay this time (last stretch was about 2.5 years), but the initial plan is to freelance as an editor. I'm also doing an MBA part-time through the University of New England.

I used to be quite fond of saying I was things such as "an anarchist … an anarcho communist … a Marxist … libertarian … Catholic … Buddhist … atheist … agnostic … anti-theist … individualist" (yes, I've been all of them), but now I'm a little chary of giving myself labels like that. Partly it's because I've burned through so many of them, but partly I'm just not sure it's a good idea to believe in things too passionately. But my girlfriend did tell me a couple of days ago "omg, it's like you have anti-government tunnel vision!", so read into that which label might still apply.

I did read a significant amount of Singer's Practical Ethics once, which is my main acquaintance with utilitarianism. I do remember being impressed by his reasoning and his readability. Not sure if I'd subscribe to utilitarianism as a moral philosophy or not. This post immediately follows a Skype chat session in which I told a friend "ethics is bollocks," but that was in a particularly business context. I do accept that it is meaningful to talk about principles by which to decide what it is desirable to do in general or in given situations, but am deeply skeptical of most of the available sets of principles.

To give you an idea of my philosophical and ethical knowledge and tastes, I have bookmarks in the middle of (among other things) Alisdair Macintyre's A Short History of Ethics, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, The Tao of Pooh, and The Portable Nietzsche. I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and to no-one's surprise I came away feeling like I'd just read 1100 pages of myself.

So, nice to meet you all. I'm not really a forum person (or I haven't been in the past, anyway), so I may be an infrequent poster. If there's a way to keep track of this with my RSS reader, that could change.

Hey Ben, good to see you on here. I think your girlfriend might have a point. Ayn Rand indeed...

Anyway, you should have a look at TraderJoe's threads if you haven't already. I suspect you two will find a lot in common. On the 'ethics is bollocks' sentiment, I suspect most of the people who post here will agree quite strongly, at least insofar as it's normally taught. Personally I'm (I think) a meta-ethical nihilist - maybe even a common or garden moral nihilist. But, to paraphrase The Princess Bride, people keep saying that word - I do not think it means what they think it means. I have a grand plan to create a series of bitesize threads on why I think nihilism is sound, and why I think it ultimately leads us back to (hedonostic) utilitarianism. Bitesize because a) no-one reads essays on web-forums, b) the argument has several relatively small components, c) I'm more likely to get around to it if I don't feel like I have to do everything at once, and d) I want to try and fashion it as a semi-wiki argument, where I constantly go back and edit based on the replies each section gets - this will be much easier to do to a couple of paragraphs at a time than to a whole essay.

I am comforted by your belief in corporate social responsibility, by the way And as a random aside, do you know of any difference in nuance between 'chary' and 'wary'? The dictionary makes them sound identical, but it's irksome to have two different words that mean and are spelt valmost identically.



Incidentally, he might not be boasting about it on here, but Ben is semi-officially one of the world's leading authorities on console-based single player RPGs

Hi, Ben.
Welcome to Felicifia. I hope you enjoy your stay.

So what did you study at University of Melbourne?

I've actually read the book On Certainty by Wittgenstein and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I've noticed I share his interests in linguistics, maths and logic, so I'm sure I'll come back to his writing in not too long. What do you make of the Tractatus?

Also, I must say I'm very interested in what you believe about corporate social responsibility and what your think tank does. Perhaps if we discuss such things we might find out whether you're really a nihilist. And whether you are easily pidgeonholed into any foundational ethical position.

Jinksy:

Did I say anything about nihilism? I might have, but I'm not confident of using the term with enough precision. Maybe I am a nihilist.

Not aware of any difference between chary and wary. I just wrote chary for some reason, looked it up in the dictionary to see if I was right to use it, then kept it instead of wary because it was there first. I don't advise anyone else to do the same, though—if faced with alternatives such as these, it's better to choose the more common one.

Depends on what you mean by CSR. I'd expect corporations and the people in them to adhere to some basic moral standards, such as that you shouldn't kill people for money, but beyond that I'm skeptical of the whole idea. Businesses are around to create wealth, and the managers' duty is to see that happens. I hate to see companies spending time and money on moral crusades or charitable activity that has nothing to do with their business. By providing goods and services, businesses already do people a huge amount of good. Their social responsibility ends there.

No, I won't be boasting about the RPG thing. I spent about 3.5 years on an aborted PhD in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, with the thesis being on the political outlook of traditional offline single-player RPGs. But that's in the past now, thank god.

Ryan:

I think I've answered a lot of your comments by responding to Jinksy. On Wittgenstein, I haven't read On Certainty, but I'd like to. A lot of the Tractatus is beyond me (I don't know enough formal logic), but I like the more aphoristic sections, especially "Whatever can be said, can be said clearly" and "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

BenHourigan wrote:Did I say anything about nihilism? I might have, but I'm not confident of using the term with enough precision. Maybe I am a nihilist.

I've come to despair of finding precision in philosophical language, but I think the phrase 'ethics is bollocks' captures the spirit of some sort of moral nihilism...

Depends on what you mean by CSR. I'd expect corporations and the people in them to adhere to some basic moral standards, such as that you shouldn't kill people for money, but beyond that I'm skeptical of the whole idea. Businesses are around to create wealth, and the managers' duty is to see that happens. I hate to see companies spending time and money on moral crusades or charitable activity that has nothing to do with their business. By providing goods and services, businesses already do people a huge amount of good. Their social responsibility ends there.

I've read that Economist article, too It all sounds too pat to be convincing, though. I don't want to argue politics here but one thing I think's been demonstrated countless times over is that nothing in the physical world is that simple. I can't really offer a specific alternative, but that's the point - it's a major weakness of strict libertarianism that it assumes that one simple political principle applied to any one of some immensely complicated social situations is always more likely to generate a desirable (but immensely complicatedly desirable) outcome than any other approach - for example, one that involves looking at the facts of any situation and adjusting your plans accordingly. (obviously I don't think the same parsimony is a weakness in ethical principles, but they're a very different category)

No, I won't be boasting about the RPG thing. I spent about 3.5 years on an aborted PhD in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, with the thesis being on the political outlook of traditional offline single-player RPGs. But that's in the past now, thank god.

Shame, really. As I recall, you were one of the only computer games academics who'd noticed that studying computer games might involve playing more than a couple...

A lot of the Tractatus is beyond me (I don't know enough formal logic)

As far as I remember, there's no formal logic in Tractatus. Wittgenstein just didn't bother specifying the relations of sections to one another, which isn't very helpful, especially since they seem to be inconsistently related.

but I like the more aphoristic sections, especially "Whatever can be said, can be said clearly" and "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

I like the second a lot too, though given that numerous philosophers have made a career out of trying to decipher Tractatus, the former seems less convincing. Or at best, it seems to be evidence that Wittgenstein isn't a good writer.

Jinksy wrote:Anyway, you should have a look at TraderJoe's threads if you haven't already. I suspect you two will find a lot in common.

I don't know whether I've posted enough about myself for Ben to form that impression, but I thought that about his first post before I even saw this comment. It made me smile

BenHourigan wrote:I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and to no-one's surprise I came away feeling like I'd just read 1100 pages of myself.

I don't have much spare time atm, but currently I feel like I've read 350 pages of myself - am very much looking forward to the next 650. It makes only the third great book [imo] I've ever read that was written by a woman.

Hmm, Atlas Shrugged happens to be in my house as well. It stands out as one of the few really intellectual, philosophical books on our shelves. I ought to check it out sometime.

TraderJoe wrote:[only the third great book [imo] I've ever read that was written by a woman.

What were the other two?

RyanCarey wrote:Hmm, Atlas Shrugged happens to be in my house as well. It stands out as one of the few really intellectual, philosophical books on our shelves. I ought to check it out sometime.

From what I've heard of AS it sounds like a longer and more boorish version of The Outsider.

I've now finished it and can say that I expect it to be the most influential book I've read to this date. I've already begun to adopt a number of the themes within it as part of the creed by which I live, and am amused to note that I held by some of the ideas contained within it even before I'd read the book.

The other two were Middlemarch and Gone with the Wind.

Please do go read it. I can think of few better ways to spend a day.

Damn Randroids

TraderJoe wrote:I've now finished it and can say that I expect it to be the most influential book I've read to this date. I've already begun to adopt a number of the themes within it as part of the creed by which I live, and am amused to note that I held by some of the ideas contained within it even before I'd read the book.

You are taking the mickey aren't you?