Just some fragments

Although we might find some preconditions for all of our social facts, that does not mean that we can make necessary claims based upon them. What if they just happen to be the conditions under which we have constructed our worlds? Would there possibly be any other way of creating such worlds? Perhaps that is what Nietzsche was attempting!

To what extent can we have propositions with truth values about consciousness? Subjectivity is what makes truth-claims. Can we make truth-claims about the truth-claimer? After all, truth-claims are made about objects....

Physical money brings out the absurdity of money. In it one can see the meaning of money, that has a value beyond most other things, embodied. It would not be so absurd unless the embodiment was such a banal thing, it is simple plastics or cotton devoid of any other value.

Negative systems of valuation aim at the elimination of something. For Nietzsche it could be the religious person, for Beauvoir the religious fanatic or the housewife; the home-maker fights a battle against dust, against dirt – a eternal fight, a fight against what always returns.

If these struggles never goes somewhere, should we still engage in them. If the new dust brought in by the summer-breeze are unstoppable, ought it's elimination to be our highest value? Beauvoir certainly don't think so.... But if it is a question of control, ought we not at least give meaning to the keeping in check of what inhibits our more creative movements?

And as far as real friends, tell all my cousins I love ’em Even the one that stole the laptop, you dirty motherfucker!

– Kanye West on No More Parties in LA

All ethics is based in some error. There is a deviation from some goal that is to be corrected; that is the goal of ethical action.

All ethics is future oriented, we act towards something which is not yet.

What if we oriented ourselves not towards something, but from something. We are still traveling, but not towards our destination, but from a source?

If one reflects on something, one distances oneself from it.

To ask the question: should I be with them, is to place oneself outside the unity of the relationship, it is to set oneself apart from the other, us becomes me and them

Ethics is the study of how to live a human life....

Only the resigned don't care

Once one has lived a certain time as free from others, as proprietor of ones own actions, one has gained a real history. That is, a history of acting, of being oneself; not the history of being acted upon that one has from birth.

In this history you lay.

For us to talk about something it has to be something different from us, there has to be some distance between then subject and the object being talked about. If one signifies something, one must not be what it signifies.

Simone de Beauvoir claims that one must have freedom to use language, is this what she means?

When we enter into the social-linguistic community we can be aware of how others view us as determinate beings – he is so and so. Do we have a self prior to this, is there some experience of ourself before we are able to put words on it? If so, can we feel satisfied with how it is expressed by others as a so-and-so? If not, then there is a gap; a gap between who I feel I am, and who I, and others, think I am.

¿What happens in this gap?

–– Whilst talking about Lacan

To desire is to want something. If to be selfish is to act to get what you want, then all desire would be selfish. If selfishness is to act to only get what you want, then all desire is not selfish. To desire is always to want something, but you can want something for yourself, or your desires can extend beyond yourself to be for something else than yourself. In the latter case, a desire is not selfish.

Common ethical thought experiments – especially in utilitarian thinking – set up a situation which contains a ethical dilemma (e.g. the trolly problem) and employs it as a means to reflect around our moral intuitions. My question is if these moral deeds ¹ can be made sense of in isolations of all the background they take place in context of. A good example – and where the idea came to me – was in an example Peter Singer came with in the movie "An Examined Life". There, Singer comes up with the thought experiment of being faced with seeing a child drown in a shallow pond. There is no one else around, and you know as a certainty that the pond is very shallow, so it does not pose a threat to you if you wade in. Singer adds that you are wearing a pair of very expensive shoes that would be ruined if you wade in to the pond. Now of course, if you wade in you would be saving the child, a pair of ruined expensive shoes seems like a small price to pay for saving a child's life. However, Singer then raises the possibility of using the price of the shoes, assuming you could sell them, to donate to Oxfam, and plausibly saving multiple children's life through e.g. buying medicine.

Now my question arises of whether it not is too artificial to look at this drowning-child-incident in isolation. Surely, you could have sold your shoes at any time leading up to this encounter, and thus saved multiple children.

Furthermore, the architecture of this thought experiment also seem to put the whole of morality on the individual, there is no question of action-by-the-group, communal deliberation etc. The question of morality simply becomes a problem for the individual to solve in isolation from other individuals.

Truth as what comes out of a discussion, at some point the parts are satisfied. A problem arises when a more powerful instance comes from outside, then the discussion should be seen as also containing this instance, they thus dominate the discussion from there on out.