Intergalactic Summit

Live with what you have done, and try in the future to only do that which you can live with.

Indeed. One of the greatest tragedies of our age is that the Shakorites do not believe themselves to be evil. If only they could be convinced of the the truth regarding their abhorrent activities then peace in the cluster would be a lot closer.

Across the Sobaki Sands, beyond the Great Wet Desert, amidst the Vasty Dark; honor the Tribe, the Clan more, the Family most of all. Wherever you roam, tell of your name is tell of the Family. Never forget them what raised you from the dust of forebears gone back to the deep sands, and never tell a pathmark of em, or deny salvage to em, or spit in the wind when the kine are athirst.

Let all else beg the spirits to stop us.

If God granted me the means to exterminate the Minmatar people, I would do so without the slightest guilt or the slightest hesitation.

Silence is as great a lesson as a voice. I'd wonder then, why the means have not been granted.

I am familiar with this rationale. If one accepts it (that is by no means a foregone conclusion but it is a common enough rationale that it is worth investigating), it provides no answer in and of itself to the question of what that chief good might be. Many have applied this rationale to vastly different worldviews and belief systems. This was the underlying point of my question to Stitcher and it is also why the ethical rational you have described is often considered tautological.

A chief good is typically considered the chief good through an argument of self-evidence or traditional axioms. In your case this chief good relates to your faith and thus a series of ethics flows out of that chief good. I have no idea whether that quote is actually contained in the Scriptures nor is it particularly relevant - what matters is that you have a systematic ethical system which flows out of your primary belief. To say that all goods should in some way be oriented towards or informed by the chief good presumes that you know what that chief good is - so my question to Stitcher still applies. Namely, how does one define that chief good? In his case he seemed to define the chief good as being that which orients itself towards the chief good which is clearly tautological. But any chief good within the system you mention is tautological in another way. It is the chief good merely because the person in question considers it to be. "It is because it is," which is about as literally tautological as one can get.

The rationale was developed as a way to test the practical application of ethics, not a manner of discovering the chief good. That problem is left unaccounted for by the rationale. That is not in and of itself a criticism of the rationale (though those do exist) because it was never intended to answer that problem. It acknowledges a primary assumption out of which the chief good is constructed.

I'll do anything to get what I want. Whether I have to end countless lives, violate the established morals of the various empires, or be someone's slave*, I'll do it.

*not THAT kind of slave. I'm not fond of manual labor.

Well, first you forgoe the fact that I did a bit more to characterize the chief good of which I speak there. You would be right if you would say that I didn't go through with the analysis of the hierarchy of goods and left it open what exactly the chief good is, but that doesn't mean that the chief good is arbitrary or open to be defined as whatever we would like it to be. If you follow the argument I presented it is not subjective what the chief good is, it isn't the chief good 'merely because the person in question considers it to be'. Rather, the chief good has objective reality independent from you and it is you who needs to conform to it, rather than the other way around.

Also, just because I didn't answer your question by giving a result, but rather opted for giving as answer the process which allows us to arrive at the result (in principle), doesn't mean that it doesn't answer your question. And while you are right that my answer is in some regard tautological, I simply respond that this is not a problem at all, as it isn't merely tautological. In fact the tautological elements it possesses aren't something bad. Being tautological isn't a bad thing in itself. Rather, being tautological is something quite valuable. All analytical truths are by necessity tautological. It's the only truely dependable form of truth we can acquire, as all non-tautological knowledge is open to revision. Thus, in so far as what I said is analytically true, it is tautological - and that is a good thing. This is the crux of my argument: We know that there must be a chief good and we know how to maximize our knowledge about it, so it is better for us humans to stick to the process and a knowledge that outlines what the chief good is, rather than to some temporal idea of what exactly the chief good is.

As humans we should be aware of our limitations. Ignoring our limitations is what leads people to claim that they possess the truth about the chief good, when in truth we know that as humans we are not able to possess this truth. We can know what the human good is - and I will refrain from explicating that here, as it's not really the question of the thread - but the human good is lastly - even though it is the good that all humans pursue as an end - just a means to an end. The 'chief' good of humans must be subservient to the universal chief good - the true chief good. Thus the answer to the question of the Shaman and thus the solution to the vicous circularity of Mr. Stitchers musings lies in acknowledging that the human good is a means as well and the end to which it is a means is an end that we can't fully grasp. That thus we need to admit our limitations and continue to question our fleeting ideas, purifying them continuously - for, even though we are limited as humans, we should, to the extent we can, reach beyond our mere humanity and refine it as far as possible.

From all this follows that if you do apply the solution given by me as a rationale to a certain world view, you already made the mistake of trying to misuse the 'chief good' - or the concept of that - as a means to justify your world view. This, though, is exactly the opposite of what I propose - and indeed vicously circular and fallacious. It flows from the idea that because we produce so many goods, the chief good must be a product of us. But then, as we are there for the sake of the chief good - and not the other way around - we're nearer to the truth if we believe that we are the products of the chief good.

To say that this misuse is what I propose is a flagrant misrepresentation of the position I sketched in my post. The proposition that "A chief good is typically considered the chief good through an argument of self-evidence or traditional axioms." shows that while you might be familiar with the approach I propose, you didn't understand it. If you understand the concept of the chief good, you would understand that there isn't 'a chief good', as the latter implies a multitude of chief goods to chose from. The chief good, though, is by necessity singular. It's not that (most) goods should be oriented to another good, but that they are (except for the chief good). The solution therefore is labouring to make your ideas of how goods relate to each other match up their objective relations and your ideas what goods are match up with what they are objectively.

To put it another way: A necessary condition for the possibility of solving the question posed by the Shaman is accepting the objectivity of goods: Moral relativism can't solve the problem.

Reframing my position in relativist terms does you no favour, Cpt. en Lefevre, in understanding it - the latter being a necessary condition for the possibility of criticising my answer in a meaningful way.

Enough is never enough.

The human hierarchy of needs says so.

I was going to say, the Sarumites are kinda Liberal in the Empire, aren't they?