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The ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy — brought to you by the guy who invented philosophy in a piece of literature.

I'm arguing the perception of inflicting harm has moral weight. I'm borrowing the term from Jonathan Haidt and others. If the arbitor of the morality of the action perceives the action as causing harm, then the action is more likely to judged as immoral relative to an action that does not.

Here's an example - which man has acted more morally?

Man A walks down the sidewalk to his home and steps over a sleeping dog in his path.

Man B walks down the sidewalk to his home and kicks a sleeping dog in his path.

Most will not consider the actions of man B to be morally equivalent to those of man A because most consider man B to have caused harm.

This pattern can also demonstrated in the animal kingdom, many social animals will go out of their way to perform actions that do not harm third parties, all other things being equal. For example, lever A delivers a treat while lever B delivers a treat and a painful electric shock to the animal in the next cage.

This does not mean the perception of harm cannot be subjective or absolute harm reduction is the ultimate goal.

Edited for spelling and clarity

I am currently listening to the gulag archipelago abridged version. I believe that we are being subjected to an invisible mental and spiritual gulag

I'm not sure. There is just something "there" in ancient philosophy that isn't there in philosophy after Aristotle. Maybe it's the wisdom vs intelligence (or a better suited word). Maybe an over reliance on our limited senses/perceptions? Less to zero intuition?

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I would understand this statement as studying philosophy but not practicing it. Right?

If you're out the door at 4:50 am and not back home til after 8 or 9 most days you take what you can get! The alternative isn't paper books its nothing.

Audio books are for philistines

In terms of the "who has time" for it part I really can't recommend audiobooks enough. I was in the same boat, in the office from like 7 to 7 or 7 to 8 with most of my free time full. I hadn't read a book for fun in years. Started listening to audio books and now manage to go through 1 or 2 a month.

> Instead of watering pseudo-philosophical ideas down into aphorisms or opinions on how you ought to live, literature turns them into accessible art.

:/ I like watering down stuff into aphorisms.

"An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half." Karl Kraus.

This was a pleasant read nevertheless ;) Thanks for sharing! writing!

Could there be an argument made that all philosophy since the ancients' should just be considered science OF philosophy?

Yup, you can be even more confident because Genetic predisposition to morality definitely predates homo sapiens.

Homo habilis, homo erectus, all the way back to ardipiths were social creatures, surely with many moral tendencies we have today.Many other animals have these morals as well. Even bees will sacrifice themselves to protect the colony(something most see as the most moral act there can be). Monkeys have a complex understanding of fairness and even sharing and empathy. The list could go on forever.

A lot of people misunderstand things like 'how did we develop the morals like our willingness to harm ourselves for others, if evolution only passes on traits beneficial to that organism'. If evolution is inherently selfish, how do we have unselfish morals. Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene can help many get over many misunderstanding of how morals developed and evolution works.

We shouldn't see evolution from just organism to organism, but we also need to think from a gene centered view. Once you understand that, its easy to see why these moral traits develop since they better the population and gene pool as a whole.

To anyone with a decent understanding of evolution it is glaringly obvious how our morals have developed, and also in many aspects why they have not.

We do better at philosophy when we have a more precise and careful history of philosophy. If the standard picture of someone’s views is oversimplified or misleading, then people who hear the standard picture and reject it will lose out on the actual subtleties of those views.

How can moderation at /r/philosophy be improved?

There is no consistency in what's treated as "Respectful" or "Arguing your position" and blatant personal attacks are left untouched and factual disagreement is removed.

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What does it matter if x thinks y or does not? Is this philosophical bibliophilia or philosophy?

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I feel like you are saying exactly what I am saying and then telling me I’m saying it wrong. I’m a bit baffled as to how I’m somehow bastardizing history.

My original point was that the oppressed cannot alleviate the yoke of their bondage by appealing to the morals of their oppressors. Which is completely true, no slave or indigenous person ever “convinced” a slave owner of the wrong of slavery or indigenous land theft that I can guarantee. Slaves themselves had to fight for it themselves and when the truth of this fact threatened to upend the union, a war happened. Were there sympathetic northerners like abolitionists and sympathizers to the plight of black peoples? Absolutely. But freed and escaped slaves like Fredrick Douglas had to speak truth to power and ONLY when the security of the union was in danger did the president free the slaves. Period. At no point before that did any legislation pass to free slaves because…

The oppressed (slaves) cannot appeal to the moral virtues their oppressors (United States government in general and the confederacy in particular) to free themselves

They had to fight, plead and advocate for themselves

Even AFTER empancipation there was STILL sharecropping, vagrancy laws, sundown towns, lynchings, redlining, segregation, Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation etc etc.

Which spawned the civil rights movement to improve the living conditions of African Americans in the centuries after emancipation, and who lead the civil rights movement? African Americans

Emancipation was not a “gift”, slaves fought and died for it for themselves.

Freedom is not a gift of patience, but the reward of determination and sacrifice, it must be taken.

My point is that the abolitionist movement, which did a whole lot more to change the law than slave revolts did, was literally lead by and made up of slaves and ex slaves appealing to the moral sense of their oppressors...

And, again, the ruling class very obviously though that it was important to free them before the security of the union was on the line. Because them freeing them was literally the very reason that the security of the union was on the line... And I don't have the first clue what slavery existing for 400 years is supposed to have to do with anything, since the entire point is things changing...

It's genuinely kind of blowing my mind how backwards your logic is on all this.

"There is a persistent conventional wisdom that in his (1776) An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (hereafter Wealth of Nations or WN), Adam Smith holds a labor theory of value (LTV)...In what follows, I deny this claim and explain the kernel of truth in it."

And you somehow think thats cheaper?