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Old 10-28-2003, 09:19 AM   #74
Kuruharan
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Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: A Remote Dwarven Hold
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Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Kuruharan is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
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Quote:
But, then again, can a person whose goal is virtue ever achieve such a thing? To achieve a life of complete virtue is incredibly difficult, indeed impossible for most of not all.
No. Complete virtue is not possible. However, virtue is more worth striving for because it is beneficial to more than just your own selfish self. This is a point that Plato makes a few times. I think that in this thread this idea has not been given sufficient attention. Plato was not primarily concerned with individual happiness. In The Republic he tries to construct a just (moral) society. Individual satisfaction would derive from society as a whole.

Quote:
For the moment, we are constructing, as we believe, the state which will be happy as a whole, not trying to secure the well-being of a select few...

[We were] molding our commonwealth with a view to the greatest happiness, not of one section of it, but of the whole.
Part of morality is to raise one from the muck of total self-absorption. This is part of the failure of an immoral lifestyle (and I would personally say it is not the most important part, but I’m not going to get into that right now.)

The problem is that if morality is looked at from a purely humanistic perspective there is no reason to place any particular value on other human beings. (Rather ironic, that.)

To cite an extreme example: A person is hanging over the edge of a cliff. Another person happens to be going by and sees the other unfortunate. Assuming that there is no possibility of assistance arriving in time (the victim’s arms being on the point of giving out) why should the one person risk their life to save the other? If one tries to help they may save the other but die themselves. They might also both fall to their deaths (probably the most likely outcome). And, lastly, you might save them. However, there is no reason to assume that the other individual is more beneficial to society than yourself. Assuming that this person falls and dies (human reproduction being what it is) another person of approximately equivalent moral value will be born in the next few seconds after this death, so there is really no reason for you to exert yourself (your own possible death is probably not going to be beneficial to you). Nobody will know that you refused to help, you can easily claim that you reached him too late (or disavow knowledge of this entirely). Why should you help? (Also assuming that this is somebody who is unknown to you, although if it were somebody you knew then you would be helping them because of emotional attachment and that is not rational either.)

I will let you answer before I attempt to give any of my own interpretation.

I guess that I am also trying to say that I feel that you did not really address the question that the phantom asked above. You seemed, at least to me (and I may have misunderstood you), to dodge the issue. Although you also had the stated intention of being brief and might not have had time to express yourself as fully as you wished.
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