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Originally Posted by roachboy
with the last sentence of the summary, we are kind of back where we started from tho: if i understand what asaris was arguing, the problem is whether there is a "good in itself"---i dont see how it could be argued that there is something like that--but asaris presented it as leaning on a type of ontological claim that does not involve a doctrine of forms--maybe i am thinking about all this too much through a language-base framework--but i dont see it.
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Good-In-Itself, eh? But not in the Platonic sense? To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure what the Good-In-Itself would consist of, barring some kind of Form-like role. Good, as I see it, is a social concept denoting favored objects and actions. I think we can all agree that good and evil are opposite poles of a normative scale for evaluating [actions, decisions, etc]. With this in mind, I don't understand what a Good-In-Itself would be. Normative concepts exist only in the minds of those who use such concepts to rank entities in some kind of hierarchy. And as I said earlier, when all possible entities possess the trait of one of the poles of such a hierarchy, the hierarchy itself ceases to exist.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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