to defend objective morality

It is possible to defend objective morality. I think I did so on my blog a long time ago. The main way I would do so would be to shorten the version of Dr Michael Huemer, Bryan Caplan or Dr John Searle. This would be in two steps one would be to show universals exist. Then to show moral principles are universals. Next to show they are known or can be known by reason. I never know when I am about to be interrupted so I am nervous about how long this letter can be.  God willing I will write a short defense.  Yellow is a universal. Yellow is a color. It is not an idea. It is something yellow things have in common. It does exist. for the sentence "Yellow is a color" to be true, yellow must exist. Therefore universals exist. There are many kinds of universals. Moral principles are an example of universals. To know the existence of  a universal you do not need a reason. You can recognize its truth prima facie. I will expand on this in a minute  bli neder.
Part of the problem comes from Hume. It is possible to sum up David Hume's vital

assumptions about reasoning in a single proposition: Reason does NOTHING except locate the presence or absence of contradictions. Whenever Hume wants to show that reasoning cannot support something, he uses the same argument: the alternative is not a  

contradiction.  An Alternative Conception of Reason. Consider the claim: Circular arguments are invalid.  Think about it for a while.  You can see that it is true -- but how?  Even  

though Hume himself uses this principle in his argument, we could never justify it on his principles.  The denial is not a contradiction. We can at least conceive that "Some circular arguments are valid" is true. At this point it will be useful to summon Kelley Ross's argument for different levels or modes of necessity. But I am trying to be short here. I am not sure which steps I can skip in order to present a whole argument.

So what we have is we know things that are not known by observation nor by induction nor deduction. But we know them to be true. That is by reason. Hume made a terrible mistake that has eroded the foundations of morality. For the way we know morality is by reason.

Hume wants to show only we can have only empirical knowledge. But that is false. There are well known counter examples and he gives some himself. One example is nothing can be yellow and blue in the same place at the same time. There are many examples. But then he resorts to a trick to claim a priori knowledge is meaningless unless it is the kind he claims.

What I am saying here is that there are degrees of necessity known by reason. "Ought" can not be derived from an "is" but it is a universal and is one mode of necessity. Kelley Ross has eight in all. 

For the people that this jargon might make sense: what I am saying is non intuitive immediate knowledge recognizes modes of necessity. 

I am calling this "reason" which Kelley Ross would not do because as he puts it "we realize that we are dealing with processes that cannot possibly belong to consciousness." when referring to Kant's idea of synthesis. And he goes into the reasons in chapter 3 of his PhD thesis sec 4. But I think is is there mainly going into the reasons for treating this kind of reason as something not thought nor sensed but known. "Kant thus says that we possess "sensible intuition" rather than the active intellectual [non sensuous] intuition ." This point became the center of a   debate between Kant and Fichte.  by Marcus Willaschek

See this link by Michael Kolkman

In spite of this point being central to Kant it does not effect my argument. How reason perceives universals is not the issue. The point is: it does.

The last paragraph. What I am saying is certain universals are given to be taken up by the mind to make synthesis. This is the basic idea of Kant. The universals have to come fro outside. Objects of cognition is I think how he would put it. 

Appendix:
(1) I have to apologize for this essay. It would not even have occurred to me to write it if not for the fact that in most USA universities they teach the opposite to freshmen, people not really prepared well to defend traditional Torah values from  onslaught and attack.
(2) Kant is along the lines that morality should have formal rules. That it is suggestive that he uses the idea of a universal rule. He is trying to capture the essence of a universal and apply it to morality. Morality is the same as the laws of physics but you just replace the = sign with "ought."
But formal rules miss something about content.
Schopenhauer  wants to lose the formal aspect of it and get down to essence.
The Rambam has both these areas interacting.

[That is to say: universals have a problem that they are content free. And pure content has another problem that it is individual, not a universal. The Rambam links the two. The rules flow from the content.]

Morality is rules  but rules that flow from an area not open to human cognition.

________________________________________________________________________________

It is possible to defend objective morality.  This would be in two steps. One would be to show universals exist. Then to show moral principles are universals. Next to show they are known or can be known by reason.  Yellow is a universal. Yellow is a color. It is not an idea. It is something yellow things have in common. It does exist. For the sentence "Yellow is a color" to be true, yellow must exist. Therefore universals exist. There are many kinds of universals. Moral principles are an example of universals. To know the existence of  a universal you do not need a reason. You can recognize its truth prima facie. 


Part of the problem comes from Hume. It is possible to sum up David Hume's vital

assumptions about reasoning in a single proposition: Reason does nothing except locate the presence or absence of contradictions. Whenever Hume wants to show that reasoning cannot support something, he uses the same argument: the alternative is not a  

contradiction.  An Alternative Conception of Reason. Consider the claim: Circular arguments are invalid.  Think about it for a while.  You can see that it is true, but how?  Even  

though Hume himself uses this principle in his argument, we could never justify it on his principles.  The denial is not a contradiction. We can at least conceive that "Some circular arguments are valid" is true. At this point it will be useful to summon  different levels or modes of necessity. 

So what we have is we know things that are not known by observation nor by induction nor deduction. But we know them to be true. That is by reason. Hume made a terrible mistake that has eroded the foundations of morality. For the way we know morality is by reason.

Hume wants to show only we can have only empirical knowledge. But that is false. There are well known counter examples and he gives some himself. One example is nothing can be yellow and blue in the same place at the same time. There are many examples. But then he resorts to a trick to claim a priori knowledge is meaningless unless it is the kind he claims.

What I am saying here is that there are degrees of necessity known by reason. "Ought" can not be derived from an "is" but it is a universal and is one mode of necessity. Kelley Ross has eight in all. 

For the people that this jargon might make sense: what I am saying is non intuitive immediate knowledge recognizes modes of necessity. 

I am calling this "reason" which Kelley Ross would not do because as he puts it "we realize that we are dealing with processes that cannot possibly belong to consciousness." when referring to Kant's idea of synthesis. And he goes into the reasons in chapter 3 of his PhD thesis sec 4. But I think is is there mainly going into the reasons for treating this kind of reason as something not thought nor sensed but known. "Kant thus says that we possess "sensible intuition" rather than the active intellectual [non sensuous] intuition ." This point became the center of a   debate between Kant and Fichte.  by Marcus Willaschek

See this link by Michael Kolkman

In spite of this point being central to Kant it does not effect my argument. How reason perceives universals is not the issue. The point is: it does.

The last paragraph. What I am saying is certain universals are given to be taken up by the mind to make synthesis. This is the basic idea of Kant. The universals have to come fro outside. Objects of cognition is I think how he would put it. 

Appendix:
 I have to apologize for this essay. It would not even have occurred to me to write it if not for the fact that in most USA universities they teach the opposite to freshmen, people not really prepared well to defend traditional Torah or Christian values from  onslaught and attack.
(2) Kant  wants that morality should have formal rules. That it is suggestive that he uses the idea of a universal rule. He is trying to capture the essence of a universal and apply it to morality. Morality is the same as the laws of physics but you just replace the "equals" sign with "ought."
But formal rules miss something about content.
Schopenhauer  wants to lose the formal aspect of it and get down to essence.
The רמב''ם has both these areas interacting.

That is to say: universals have a problem that they are content free. And pure content has another problem that it is individual, not a universal. The רמב''ם links the two. The rules flow from the content.

Morality is rules  but rules that flow from an area not open to human cognition.

After the fall of the USSR,  most young people went for business degrees and basically got worthless pieces of paper. To my mind real world skills are all that matters. Computers, Engineering, Mathematics Physics.

One friend a Serge here went to work for a company in Canada and all they do is find talent for engineering companies. What  matters most are hard core skills that people will pay hard cold cash for. 

The main thing with Reb Israel Salanter is his disciples. He did not write much but the Igeret HaMusar and letters he sent to his disciples. The main thing is the books of his direct disciples. The basic idea of Reb Israel is divided into two parts, one was midot (to work on having good character traits) and the other was fear of God. But in each one of his disciples some other basic aspect of Musar becomes apparent.To me it seem that the whole set should be taken as one whole set. That would be the two book by Isaac Blazzer the Light of Israel and the other one just printed recently. The Madragat HaAdam, Or Zfun by the Altar of Slobodka, the letters of Simcha Zisel from Kelm. [I myself did not get through it all. The letters of Reb Simcha Zisel I found incomprehensible. The later books of the Musar movement seemed to get off track however. They became "frum" and crazy eyed fanatic.] So to get to the idea of Reb Israel of fulfilling the ideal of the Torah it is not possible except on an individual basis or being part of one of the few authentic Litvak Yeshivas like Ponovitch or Brisk. [Musar was also meant to get to authentic Torah values. Reb Israel realized that to understand what Torah is really about is not automatically obvious even for a person who has gone through a lot of reading. It is like the case when it comes to law, halacha. It is to the rishonim mediaeval authorities we go. thus, Reb Israel got the idea that to get to the moral values of Torah, it is also to the rishonim that we ought to go.]

the Left will do everything possible to keep power

I have believed for a long time and that the Left will do everything possible to keep power. They will rig the machines so that every vote for Trump will register as for Hillary. They will stop at nothing. The reason is sad and simple. To the Right things like personal responsibility and paying bills matter. That is personal life and morality matters. That is why they are right wing. To the Left only one thing matters: Power. It is deeper and more intense than anything else in their lives. And they will stop at nothing in order to get it.

I had some explanation for this a while back but I forget it. Mainly it is that the Left's two gods are the "State" and Power. The main explanation from what I recall were that the Left's ideology is based on Rousseau. [But it is a ideology that also has elements from Marx, Hegel, Sartre, and ironically enough Nietzsche.] That is to say the Left is not secular. Rather they have endowed the State with all the significance of what God used to mean to people. Nowadays the God himself means little to most people---even believers.  But the State and power means everything.

r75 mp3 r75 midi  r75 nwc

My comment on Dalrock:

My impression is that when a woman says, “It is over,” there is nothing more one can do.

And his response:

This is nearly always the case. The exception that comes to mind (and proves the rule) is if the woman decides divorce would be harmful to her personally. One of the patterns my wife has commented on is she has never caused a divorcing woman to reconsider by explaining how much this will harm her children. However, if the woman becomes convinced that divorce will harm her personally, suddenly she will have a change of heart “for the children”.

But the husband is in a poor position to deliver the message that divorce will harm the woman. Another relative might be able to, as might another woman. The most effective focus is generally on the woman’s realistic dating/remarriage prospects. This is most easily framed as “You know how men are. They are too selfish to commit to an older woman/woman with children!” This, along with pointing out the real life results of the divorcées the woman knows (not the marketing job, but the details of the real replacement man).

There seems to be a kind of contradiction in the Rambam. How much of the Law of Moses is natural Law and how much is only because of revelation? In the Guide you see two different things. One is that the laws of the ancient Greeks natural law [as known by Abraham the patriarch] was necessary step towards Matan Torah [giving of the Torah]. So they are different in essence. Yet the Rambam also gives natural reasons for the laws. Maybe he thought the reasons were a necessary, but not sufficient condition?
That is reason that would create conditions for the mitzvot but not the entire cause.

English Literature in high school and college is depressing

Instead of the greats Chaucer, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Sophocles, they force people to learn stupid books by blacks


The issue is the quality of the thought of the great writers, not their color, nor sex. This is why English Literature in high school and college is so depressing. They force you to learn second rate hacks just because of their race or sex. Just see an average anthology of English Lit. what garbage they are forcing down people's throats.


But philosophy might be a good idea, or music and art courses. First year Philosophy usually deals with Plato and Aristotle which are in fact important.
The Rambam and Saadia Gaon both wrote books describing the world view of Torah and their books are not possible to understand without background in Plato and Aristotle.

thunderous creation-

Life is very precious. Be happy for every minute and every breath, and for the privileged of being a part of thunderous creation--the universe.
Learn Musar i.e., the books of Ethics of Torah written in the Middle Ages which represent straight Torah. It is very different from what is taught as Torah today which is crooked, pseudo Torah.

Also the books of Musar of the school of thought of Israel Salanter are important. 

Musar is a tool to work on one' character. People can misuse it I admit. But still I think it is effective when used right. 

What I recommend as far as Musar goes is to go through the entire set. That is every single word of the basic classical works, plus the basic works by the disiples of Reb Israel Salanter

Ideas in Bava Metzia chapters 8 and 9 edited I did what I think are some spelling corrections. Tosphot I am thinking of as either male  plural as authors of Tosphot. or sometimes male singular. The buyer is "מסופק"
Ideas in Talmud Did some grammar corrections. Lashon Hara is לשון הרע is masculine. But I also thought to use לשון רעה at least once to show that לשון itself is feminine.

r76  [r76 in midi format]  [In midi you can download the notes and that is the reason i am putting the link here]

I thought to expand a drop on the idea I wrote about Kant Hegel and the Ari based on some math. The idea in simple terms that I put on my blog was if you take an identity element and three other things, you get a kind of triad. This is the basic idea behind a certain thing called an algebra. But do not let the word scare you. There is nothing scary about it. It is just three things with an identity element. But what Cayley- Dickson  Algebra does is expand on this to make a 8 component group and then  16 and then 32 etc. It is reminiscent of what Hegel was doing and also the Reshash (Shalom Sharabi).

This would in itself not be that interesting if not for seeing how these Cayley Dickson Algebras are significant aspects of reality as in Special Relativity and String Theory. That already seems to hint at the idea that they are somehow a part of the metaphysical structure of the world.

Colleges can have a problem in the humanities and social studies departments. Avoid them as much as possible. While it is a great thing to go there to learn STEM and computers, still try to avoid these departments as much as possible.

Allen Bloom went into this in detail in The Closing of the American Mind.   

Instead one should learn Musar, that is Mediaeval Ethics.

There are however a few redeeming things which one could take. First year philosophy is usually about Plato and Aristotle. These are important. Also the arts.

The octaves [the expansion of quaternions, octonians] I think would be something that would fascinate Pythagoreans. There seems to be some odd connection between the way you remember the order of octaves and the musical scale and the fact that Shabat is the middle day of the week according to the Arizal and the recent result by Viazovska that the lattice is the most compact way of packing oranges in eight dimensions. I do not have any great results to report about this. But it seems to me that it must be more than a random coincidence. I think there must be some close connection, but I have not been able to figure out what it must be. Of course Hegel would have a field day with this. He would claim that this is what he was saying all along with his triads within triads.


I am sure lots of people would consider these to be totally unconnected, but maybe I was influenced by reading the Ari a few years back. In any case the Triads you do not need to go to Hegel for. Kant was the originator in his limited scheme. Only Hegel expanded the original idea of Kant. In any case you can see this same scheme --not in the Ari so much as in Shalom Sharabi [known as the Reshash].[That is the author of the Nahar Shalom.]

The curious thing which continues to be of interest to me is the connection with Kant . In Kelley Ross's modification of Kant he a theory of necessity, which  results in the description of eight modes of necessity. See his PhD thesis chapter 5 sec 1

Kant  does not want to expand the original triad. But I wonder.

Even  in Kant we get this triadic structure:

There is a close connection between violence and left wing politics. The reason was pointed out by Dr Michael Huemer. The Left goes by moral relativism. Systems that have at their core moral relativism do not believe in rational dialog. So the only way to argue for your beliefs is by violence. It is not the best option;- it is the only option. And this goes for any system that does not believe in rational dialog.

r71 A Minor r69

"Marx, Lenin Sartre, Nietzsche"

Socialism has become a kind of secular religion. It works up a great degree of frenzy in people. Just think of the words "Marx, Lenin Sartre, Nietzsche". You can feel your blood pressure rising. You can just hear people foaming at the mouth spitting saliva as they say these words. Try to do the same think with the two word"John Locke." You can't do it. The words themselves calm you down. You start to think about individual responsibility and  limited government.




On this blog

For roughly the thousandth time, the masters of social media in Silicon Valley are promising to do something about online hate speech. Bloomberg reports that an impressive-sounding group of tech giants — Facebook, Twitter,Google and Microsoft — have “pledged to tackle online hate speech in less than 24 hours as part of a joint commitment with the European Union to combat the use of social media by terrorists.”

It could be their are just trying to save their company and thus have given in to government pressure. Maybe it is like the Boy-scouts succumbing to pressure? 





But then the Boy Scouts also should have had that ability. Apparently they did not. I have also learned in private life it is a waste of time to stand up to the federal or local government in the USA. Government has just grown too powerful. I have suspected it is a result conspiracy by the KGB. That is I think the KGB concentrated its energies and finances to infiltrate American Universities and succeed so that the later generations of judges and politician all have been educated in the Lenin Marxism tradition.  That is while ordinary working Americans have retained traditional values the elite of government has becomes remarkably leftist. One bit of evidence I have for this is the required courses in American universities for first year students. Just looking over the texts themselves I was shocked at seeing them preach radical leftist socialism. 

 See the ytube video of Bezmenov. I admit to do this the KGB would have had to expend tremendous resources. But from what Bezmenov said it looks like they did.

There is one fellow who is a good friend of mine who thinks the KGB did not have the resources to pull off this kind of operation.  He worked there in one of the sub agencies. And it is hard to know how they could have done so. Still I think the evidence shows their fingerprints all over American universities.

"Doing repentance"

"Doing repentance" in the religious  world is thought to mean joining the religious  world. But I think that the social norms of the religious  world are very different from the Torah. "Doing repentance" is a worthy goal but I think it is the exact opposite of religious  world. The reason I say this is because the norms of the Torah and the norms and values of the religious  world are opposites.

Being strict in rituals way beyond the requirements of the Torah ought to be a warning signal in the first place. Why would people go so overboard about rituals unless there was something else they were covering up?


It is hard to point out any group whose norms are close to Torah. I think the closest you can get to actual Torah is Ponovitch and the great Litvak yeshivas where what the Torah actually says is what matters, not social norms. I mean to say there are places where the emphasis is on actually keeping and learning Torah.