6 ideas
| 23689 | Moral words have an inherited power from expressing attitudes in emotional situations [Stevenson,CL] |
| Full Idea: A term is moral because of the power that the word acquires, on account of its history in emotional situations, to evoke or directly express attitudes, as distinct from describing or designating them. | |
| From: Charles Leslie Stevenson (Ethics and Language [1944], p.33), quoted by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought 1 'Ayer' | |
| A reaction: Invites the question of what the words meant before they acquired this patina of historical usage. If 'good' orginally meant 'hurray!', its repeated usage doesn't seem to change that. If it was descriptive, why would that change with time? |
| 22817 | Citizenship involves a group of mutually supporting rights, which create community and equality [Miller,D] |
| Full Idea: The idea of citizenship is that rights support each other. Protective and welfare rights provide a basis for a political role. This underpins a sense of membership, and an obligation to provide welfare. Rights confer equal status and self-respect. | |
| From: David Miller (Community and Citizenship [1989], 3) | |
| A reaction: A helpful eludation of what a richer concept of citizenship than mere membership might look like. Communitarians have a different concept of rights from that of liberals. |
| 22816 | Socialists reject nationality as a false source of identity [Miller,D] |
| Full Idea: The socialist tradition has been overwhelmingly hostile to nationality as a source of identity, usually regarding it merely as an artificially created impediment to the brotherhood of man. | |
| From: David Miller (Community and Citizenship [1989], 2) | |
| A reaction: I have some sympathy with this, especially when nationalism is expressed in terms of enemies, but the question of what community a person can plausibly identify with is difficult. We start in hunter gather tribes of several hundred. |
| 4787 | Causation interaction is an exchange of conserved quantities, such as mass, energy or charge [Dowe, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Dowe argues that a 'causal process' is a world line of an object with a conserved quantity (such as mass, energy, momentum, charge), and a 'causal interaction' is an exchange between two such objects. | |
| From: report of Phil Dowe (Physical Causation [2000]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §4.4 | |
| A reaction: This looks very promising. Nice distinction between causal process and causal interaction. 'Conserved quantities' is better physics than just 'energy'. We can hand causation over to the scientist? |
| 14586 | Physical causation consists in transference of conserved quantities [Dowe, by Mumford/Anjum] |
| Full Idea: For Dowe physical causation consists in transference of conserved quantities. | |
| From: report of Phil Dowe (Physical Causation [2000]) by S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum - Getting Causes from Powers 10.2 | |
| A reaction: [see Psillos 2002 on this] This is evidently a modification of the idea of physical causation as energy-transfer, but narrowing it down to exclude trivial cases. I guess. Need better physics. |
| 4788 | Dowe commends the Conserved Quantity theory as it avoids mention of counterfactuals [Dowe, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Dowe commends the Conserved Quantity theory because it avoids any mention of counterfactuals. | |
| From: report of Phil Dowe (Physical Causation [2000]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §4.4 | |
| A reaction: Clearly the truth of a counterfactual is quite a problem for an empiricist/scientist, but one needs to distinguish between reality and our grasp of it. We commit ourselves to counterfactuals, even if causation is transfer of conserved quantities. |