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Moral Facts and Opinions
Ron Murphy Ethics March 3, 2015 February 16, 2020 28 Minutes
Having seen yet another moral philosopher (another religious one) make a hash of morality, I wanted to write a detailed post on my position on how morality is nothing more than opinion elevated to a fictitious nobility; a common man, made special by simply calling him a lord or a bishop.
There are a few details to tidy up, and then we can get on to moral facts and opinions and the distinctions between objective and subjective moral facts or truths:
The error of the is/ought distinction
A potted history that explains how we got to where we are now
The mental lives of empirical creatures
Facts, induction and deduction
Moral facts are opinions we really care about
Objective/Subjective moral Truths/Facts
Moral consequences
The is/ought barrier is baloney. Hume figured that out, but I can see how when some people read him it might seem as though he endorses the barrier as a reality. But I read him as denouncing the foolish philosophers and theologians that see the boundary. I think he's saying the boundary is illusory because there are no oughts that are distinct from ises – everything is ises.
Of course I may have read Hume wrong, but then that only makes him wrong and he should have figured out that there are only ises.
The potted history explains why there are only ises.
How We Got Here – A Potted History
Let's start out with a summary of what happened to get us where we are today. This is necessary to get to the modern day picture. If you are religious you probably don't buy this picture, but instead seem content to hold beliefs that were established in a dim and ignorant time. If you're an old school philosopher you might not buy it either. I'd be interested to know why; but so far any religious and philosophical counters to this following explanation, about our reality and our understanding of morality, have been full of errors.
This review of how we humans got here is necessarily simplistic. But I think the meaning is plain enough. This explanation exists in other sources, but I'm summarising it here for the context that's required to avoid any special kind of dualism, gods and excuses for 'absolute' or 'objective' morality.
Humans and pre-humans, as species, awoke to start thinking about stuff, about themselves and their world, and their place in it, more than other animals did or do. It's difficult to imagine how rudimentary this thinking was. This development is lost in history. All we have are artifacts and then writings from societies that came much later than this dawn of thinking. In a way, the lost distant history and the emergence of Greek philosophy is analogous to our individual personal awakening from infancy. We can't remember much, if anything at all, about our early life before the ages of two or three, and then a scant few memories remain. Of those very early personal memories, some may be false memories that we've adopted from later tales about our early life. Similarly, all we know now is that at some stage humans, like we as individuals, started to think and become self aware to a degree that we would now recognise as the possession of human cognition, and all we have left are stories, some of which will be false.
With little more to go on, humans played with their newly found minds, and invented gods to explain what couldn't be explained. They also invented witches, ghosts and all sorts of other creatures, material and non-material, to explain away strange events. They used those gods to justify blaming and punishing other people that would not comply with what the gods or their priests required. I suppose this was a natural outcome, from a time when the ideas of reason and evidence were not as well developed as they are today. It's relatively easy to invent an entity in the mind that had its own sort of existence, it's own reality, and yet couldn't be touched by the physical world, by the senses.
This was the creation of what I refer to as the primacy of thought as the key to understanding the whole of reality. Philosophy and religion were bedfellows dictating this primacy of thought, while our senses were believed to give us access to only some part of a greater imagined reality, and not always reliably at that. A lot of the mental stuff wasn't reliable either, but you couldn't really test that – you sort of had to take it on faith. And oh how we did.
Not all thinkers fell for this supremacy of the mind. Naturalists/Empiricists of various kinds recognised the folly of it. Conflicting beliefs seemed so easy to conjure up, and the only reality that smacked you in the face on a regular basis was the material world. It wasn't as if many philosophers or theologians denied the existence of the material world and our sensory access to it. Their main difference of opinion with naturalists was that they thought there was more than just the physical world. Many desperately wanted there to be more, so much so that they really believed there was more, of other realms, gods, demons, angels. With such little understanding of the material world, and our part in it, as existed then, the balance of power remained with these dualists, and the religious in particular.
Eventually the Enlightenment, better philosophical tools of thought, and science emerged. And then Darwin. And then the brain sciences, from psychology to neuroscience. And eventually we started to get a better picture of what we were and what we are now.
What do we understand now of our history?
Life started as simple empirical creatures, interacting with the world through physics and chemistry alone. And much of physics is chemistry and chemistry is physics, at the molecular level, where the electromagnetic interaction of electrons around atoms describes everything at those scales. In small life forms, the early cells, the interaction is the physical boundary of the cell wall and the chemical transmission of information, food, energy. Information, food and energy are indistinguishable on these scales, they are just interactions of particle elements and molecules, and the exchange of energy.
Multi-cellular creatures evolved variation in their cell types, to become organisms with multiple organs. And, for our purposes here, one distinct cell type is of interest: the neuron. A neuron is just another type of cell that specialises. It's generally a long cell that transmits signals along its length – not by the conduction of electrons as in an electrical wire or electronic component, but as waves of ions crossing the boundary along the cell's length, with each ion event triggering the next, like a Mexican Wave. The neuron can also grow extensions – synapses – to connect to other neurons, and other cell types in our peripheral nervous system. The connections are not direct cell-to-cell physical contact of cell walls, as much as gaps across which chemical signals can be transmitted. We are creatures with brains: a collection of interacting neurons.
The remaining details of how neurons work is not important for now. What is important is this: there is little significant difference between peripheral neurons and brain neurons. The brain neurons are essentially 'sensing' and 'activating' each other just as the sense neurons connect to each other and to other tissues or to the neurons of the brain. Whatever other cell types and processes go on in brains, this seems to be the most significant feature: brain neurons are sensing and activating each other in such a complex way that the brain becomes aware of itself, even invents an abstract model of itself, me, my mind and I. We consider our peripheral neurons to be engaged in the empirical aspect of our epistemology while the brain neurons are engaged in the mental aspect, our reasoning. But since brain and peripheral neurons are all engaged in the same type of physical and chemical activity we are in fact totally empirical systems, and what we call the mind and its thinking and reasoning function is the outcome of a mass of empirical neurons working together. We were empirical beings all along! We are empirical beings!
Consciousness … humans have argued for a long time about what it is. But here's a materialist perspective. Brain neurons communicate locally, regionally, and externally, in and outside the brain. The brain's processes can be viewed as many layered models of processing. And such models don't require detail all the way down. So, here's what consciousness is: when a system of neurons has such massive amounts of internal interaction, and creates models of itself, it also creates models of its modelling, such that this modelling becomes so internally reflexive, that one model that emerges is the mind. The brain's self awareness of the brain's own processes is what the brain is creating, as an executive level model. And here's the killer: this mind model does not model, does not sense, the individual neurons engaged in its own modelling process – the brain's mind model feels like it's a free floating entity, an abstract non-physical entity, and this is why we (we embodied brains) have the feeling that gives rise to the dualism of mind and body. The error in the brain's model of its own self, is to give it the impression that that very model is something altogether different from the physical brain that creates it. This error has a lot to answer for.
And so here we are. Products of Evolution. Embodied brains. Empirical creatures, with brains that concoct mental lives. Conscious creatures with a flawed model of our own consciousness. Those flaws have consequences. One is an erroneous view of what morality is. Another is the idea that death for apostasy is morally necessary to maintain a religious system of morality, … but more on that elsewhere.
Our mental lives are to a great extent full of illusions. The brain cannot sense its own neurons at work, so to the brain itself, it feels like it's a disembodied mind, floating around in close proximity to the head, somewhere behind the eyes. The physical brain with a self model of consciousness is the reality; but the free floating conscious mind is the illusory aspect that the conscious brain has of its conscious processes, and that is what is meant by the illusion of consciousness.
The abstract self, the mind, vanishes when looked at closely, or when the brain deteriorates. We know many of our optical illusions are not in fact tricks of the physics of optics but tricks that the brain plays on itself; or more graciously, the brain is fooled into to believing something is the case when it isn't.
Our whole mental view of our visual ability is an illusion – we do not see a continuous movie made up of frames, but rather concoct an internal mental model based on snippets of encoded transmissions from the eyes and the re-invention of previous models. It's such a remarkable system that it really does look like the mind has an immediate and detailed and accurate window on the world.
Internal mental illusions are plentiful. There is zero evidence that an out of body experience is anything other than an illusion, and much evidence of it being an error. Out of body illusions can be stimulated in the lab and the subject tested on the accuracy of what they think they are seeing from outside the body, and they are wrong. Experiences such as 'astral planing' are no more than trippy internal experiences, no matter how profound the experience may feel. The same with hallucinogenic drugs: the experiences my feel profound, and indeed, chemical changes in the brain may take place as a result of using them, sufficient to enlighten one's life or destroy it … but all that is happening between the ears.
We invent gods, contradictory gods, and make up awfully bad reasons for believing in them, and yet there is zero evidence of any god anywhere, ever, as far as we can tell. And, again, to doesn't matter how uplifting and spiritual these 'visions' or 'voices from god', it's all an internally generated light show.
In the sense laid out above it's important to grasp that the categories we invent, the physical and the mental, the material and immaterial, even categories of the material such as the distinction between physics, chemistry, biology, are all fairly arbitrary, with regard to the material matter that we are made of and that we interact with. When an asteroid impact hits the earth and results in atmospheric reactions that wipe out species, that's chemistry and physics at work, not a punishment from the gods.
In this context we are material creatures in a material world, experiencing that world empirically through our epistemologically limited sense and brain neurons, co-opting our brain neurons to perform reasoning functions on the empirical data we collect. Our gods are the inventions of brains of such creatures.
This leaves us with some straight forward results. There is no evidence of anything other than the material world, the material universe. There is no evidence that we humans are anything but components of that material universe and not somehow distinct from it or transcendent beyond it. There is no evidence of a magical mind or soul that is distinct in kind from our material brain-body systems. There is no evidence of anything like a god from which we can derive something that might be a moral fact. There is nothing in the cosmos that reveals itself as something that might be a moral fact.
So, what are moral facts? First, it might help to establish what we mean by 'facts'.
We can take facts to be truths or near truths about the world, or something along those lines. That sounds a bit vague, and that's because even the most solid facts we have are vague in detail if not in appearance. How do we establish facts? In one of two ways mainly, and often in some combination: inductive evidence, deductive reasoning.
Inductive Evidence
Arguments from induction have a bad rep in philosophy, but that's the fault of philosophy. Remember the primacy of thought, the supremacy of the mind that I mentioned earlier? That's where this erroneous philosophical misjudgement comes from. The black swan argument has a lot to answer for.
I see only white swans. I confer with other people and they too see only white swans. We don't presume we've seen all swans in the world, so we conclude, tentatively, or perhaps confidently, but contingently, that all swans are white. We have induced, from several, maybe many, particulars of evidence to the general case that all swans are white. Fact: all swans are white.
But then someone tells us there are black swans in the southern hemisphere, and maybe brings back a pair to Europe! Oh no, our fact isn't correct any more! What the hell happened?!
Induction worked, that's what happened. We contingently concluded that all swans are white, based on the ones we'd seen. It was inductive: arguing from the particular evidence, contingently to the general case.
And now we adapt our argument based on these new particulars, and the result is a modified. Fact: all swans indigenous to Europe are white.
This evidence based inductive argument is, in this simple form, representative of science: observation, specific data, hypothesis statement, checking the hypothesis against more data, adapting the hypothesis to account for the new data. Science is a lot more than that. Collections of such uses of inductive evidence form whole sciences, and many such collections can be used to create theories that model the world so well we call what we can derive from them facts.
The basis of inductive evidence is simple:
Collect evidence
Form a contingent inductive argument from the particular evidence collected to the general case.
Declare the general case as a contingent fact
If conflicting evidence comes in, adapt the argument and the details of the fact – and if the new evidence makes the argument and the fact useless, abandon it, otherwise declare the updated contingent fact.
For more on the contingency of human knowledge (and the bogus 'other ways of knowing') see here.
You will find that people like David Deutch will make a fuss about how bad induction is, that isn't how science works; and many philosophers will tell you all about the 'problem of induction'. They are talking nonsense, because there is no problem with induction unless you use it incorrectly – that is, if you expect it to prove anything beyond doubt. It doesn't.
An induction argument is a contingent argument based on particular evidence in order to make some useful general statement about the world, and it's adaptable, correctable. What could be more useful to human beings, tiny creatures trying to understand the universe? It's the best we can do with incomplete knowledge and fallible and limited evidence collecting and reasoning tools.
Here we come to another aspect of the error that the philosophical supremacy of mind created: giving deductive reasoning too much credit. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful tool. But it doesn't discover new facts about the world. Instead, it tidies up our reasoning about facts about the world, and helps to link facts together in a more reliable reasoning process.
Deductive reasoning is based on logic. The binary stuff: 0/1, true/false, yes/no. Deductive arguments take a set of premises and using strict rules argue to some conclusion. That sounds pretty good. We can get from something we know and really reliably, absolutely, prove the conclusion, right? Wrong. That absolutely bit – that's where it's wrong.
A deductive argument is valid if the conclusion cannot be false, if the premises are true. A sound argument produces a conclusion that is absolutely true if the argument is valid and the premises are absolutely true.
That's just fine, but there's that absolutely again, but here it is clearer that the soundness of the argument depends on the absolute truth of the premises. In other words, the conclusion is contingent on the validity of the argument and the truth of the premises. Deduction stuff is contingent after all. But our understanding of at least simple arguments is rock solid – if we can rely on logic at all – a question for another time.
The problem for deductive arguments sits squarely in the contingency of the premises. And so for any deductive argument, we have to be able to prove its premises too, … with another argument; and then that argument's premises; and on it goes back up the line of reasoning – all necessary for a sound argument and our ultimate conclusion we want to prove absolutely.
And so it all falls down. We cannot prove all premises in a chain of arguments. Somewhere along the line we rely on either a guess, some arbitrary decision, some assertions by definition, or an inductive argument from observation.
Some premises, in mathematics, for example, are called axioms. What are they? They are premises we take to be true, either because we have learned, inductively and deductively after a lot of work that they appear to be true, or because intuitively they seem to be true and we haven't had good reason to reject them. Mathematics is contingent on these axioms, for its absolute truth, so it isn't absolutely true, in any of its claims. That's quite different from whether it's useful enough for our purposes.
Acquiring Premises
Intuition can sometimes be good. But what is intuition other than the physical brain having established some idea about what might be the case. We don't know why a particular intuition exists – though in some cases psychology and neuroscience can give us some ideas. But many intuitions are shown to be flat out wrong, so they are not arbiters of ready made truths. Will someone point this out to Alvin Plantinga – sensus divinitatis – he has intuition of having an intuition that becomes a presupposition that we have that intuition, that leads him to believe that … there is a god … or some such nonsense.
What about scientific foundations? They are taken from observations about the world, and a few trial and error guesses, hypotheses, that someone then tests, and finds to be good enough.
Are there any absolute truths that we can use as premises? None that I know of. Really, none. There might be some we assume to be true because it really feels as though they should be true. But I bet in all cases it can easily be pointed out what guess or other arbitrary choice is being made, or how it's based on some observations about the world.
In the end deduction is nothing more than a tool to get us from one set of contingent facts to another set in a reliable manner. The proof of deduction is localised to the argument and does not prove the premises; so its reach is limited.
And so always, we are empirical humans, observing the world, even empirically reasoning about it, since our brains are full of empirically operating neurons interacting to carry out reasoning processes. And all our knowledge so acquired is contingent.
Moral Facts are Opinions We Really Care About.
With a working idea of what facts amount to, how are we to think about moral facts?
Are there no absolute moral facts? What about 'it is wrong to kill' makes that an absolute moral truth, an objective moral fact?
Oh, hold on, 'objective', another of those words we need to clear up. I'll come back to that…. But, in the mean time, when it comes to the ways in which the term 'objective moral fact/truth' is often used, no, there are none, they are all contingent, and when we look closer, they are nothing more than opinions.
Humans evolved to have the brains we have, to build the social structures we do, to have children, to live as a family. Our brains work using reason, but in many ways they are still very much like the brains of our animal relatives, subject to emotions, feelings that make us feel that something ought to be the case, that make us decide to act for no apparent rational reason – though we might rationalise our reasoning to fit our emotional decisions after the event.
When we get together and decide that killing each other is a bad idea we do that because we feel that. We feel it about ourselves, because we are survival machines – hey, who wants to be killed, right?
We have evolved to have empathy for each other, and we have developed a theory of mind whereby we think that other people behaving like us think and feel like us, and that they too don't want to be killed.
This isn't necessarily something that we all figure out in some rational burst of self-awareness. It's what creeps up on us personally, through our personal mental development, and what we learn from our cultural past and the way in which it is passed on to us in turn, through our moral systems.
That cultures have tended to invent gods as authority figures to authorise these rules seems obvious now. In such a world it makes things a lot easier if you invent gods that tell us we should not kill. It's also handy if your particular god tells you under what convenient circumstances it's good to kill; and that makes for a very handy self-sustaining system of bullshit if that god is supposed to authorise the killing of people that don't believe in that god and his non-killing rules.
It's fairly easy to see how many conflicting religions can invent and then mold the characters of their own gods for the sustenance of those religions and the cultures that they are bound to. It's fairly easy to see that within the context of some general feelings about killing, different cultures can come to enhance their morality, by constructing god stories to suit their own particular circumstances. And they can acquire some seriously dumb arbitrary moral rules along the way.
It's fairly easy to see that, without evidence for these gods, the moral facts attributed to them are nothing of the sort: they are not moral facts at all.
All human moral facts are based on opinions humans have about how other humans should behave, and if maintaining such benefits to us necessitates agreeing that we must be mutually subject to these rules, then that's fine. We all get along by sharing some moral opinions.
But I like strawberry and you like chocolate, so who is right? If moral opinions are just like that, aren't they easily argued against?
Yes they are!
Doesn't it mean someone can just say, "No, in my opinion killing is good, so I'm going to kill you."?
Yes it does! Sorry if that's uncomfortable. But bear with me.
Morality is all about opinions just like that. But the thing is, many if not most of us are survival machines, and we like an easy life, so most of us are prepared to submit to the general opinion that killing is bad, most of the time.
In my opinion, formed from my personal emotional feelings about my survival, the survival of my children and parents, the survival of my friends, killing is always bad news, if not for me then for someone in my society, and I can empathise with victims of killings. That's why killing is bad. It's a feeling, an emotion, and a reasoned argument about those instincts as to why we all should not kill – an opinion based on all that, such that in my opinion killing is wrong.
I have invented an ought as an emotionally charged is.
What about the opinion that eating pork is not okay but eating beef or lamb is? Nope. Not worthy of being a moral opinion . That does nothing for me. But my Jewish and Islamic friends feel otherwise. Some might pass it off as a cultural requirement rather than a moral proscription, and that is exactly what it is; but for many it's an opinion elevated into a moral fact, for them.
So, here we have two moral facts that have been elevated from mere opinion: 'not killing' and 'not eating pork'. One is more widespread in its acceptance than the other. The latter seems more obviously a relative moral fact, more like an opinion. To may Jews and Muslims the avoidance of pork is more than an opinion, it is a moral fact.
On the other hand we can concoct yet another moral opinion that eating any animal is wrong. But such an opinion derives from the association of human suffering with the suffering of other animals. It's still an opinion.
They are all opinions.
"Moral relativism! You're a moral relativist!" – Well, yes and no.
This is descriptive moral relativism I'm presenting, rather than prescriptive moral relativism.
I can observe and describe a relative matter of moral fact: some people think eating pork is morally good or neutral, some think it is wrong, and yet others think eating any animal is wrong.
But, I do not subscribe to an absolute unbridled prescriptive moral relativism.
I would suggest and argue that Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is morally wrong. That is an opinion of mine based on my observations of reports of how harmful it is, and, given my low opinion of the moral merits claimed for it, I feel I can argue that my moral opinion on this matter is a worthy one.
A moral fact is only an opinion given some extra emotional status, sometimes backed up by arguments from evidence, sometimes backed up by the belief in some imagined god that sanctions the moral fact.
But in the latter case the claim that there is a god is itself based on an opinion, but one with zero supportive evidence. And as you'll often find, the religious, when pushed, tend to turn to human nature themselves – they just seem unable to take that last step and fess up that their god is an invention to codify the moral opinions of humans, sometimes of humans from more barbaric times, and that's why their holy books often present a barbaric immoral god.
That most humans feel very strongly about the 'not killing' moral opinion, such that they hold to it and elevate it into a moral fact, does not stop it being an opinion. It is an opinion common to most if not all humans. But it nonetheless an opinion based on feelings, biologically evolved feelings.
A male lion, on acquiring a new mate, is likely to kill the cubs his new mate has had by some previous vanquished male. The killing is a bit strong for humans, perhaps, but relations between step parents and step children is known to not always run smoothly. Why is that? Human couples can adopt children quite well, so what is it about some step-relationships that are so fractious? How often are step children driven out of a home? What, of our instincts of jealously, possession and so on, have we retained from our older animal past? The detachment leading to abuse, sexual, violent, or both, is certainly not unknown. And most of the sexual violence is male on female, and the male on male violence strikes of competition. This is not to say that human relationships are so simplistically similar to that of lions [Update: Lobsters], but, we are not as distant from our animal past as we would like to believe.
Suppose there is some alien race of beings that do not have our empathy and other brain tools helping us survive as a group, but rather use some other facts and reasons upon which they build their societies. What if an alien race exists whereby the females always bite off the heads of the males after mating, or where the female lets her offspring eat her, or where reproduction is non-sexual and killing is an enjoyable sport? Where does our 'not killing' prescription fit into the bigger picture? You may have recognised that these are indeed other behaviours of some other animal species.
The point is that, our moral codes are arbitrary in the cosmos – but particular to us, as far as we know.
Note that this is an inductive argument, about moral facts being opinions: it is wrong to kill because all the creatures that can think about this stuff that we have come across so far tend not to like killing. It is contingent upon having a majority of humans that feel this way. It is contingent upon us putting in place systems that counter our occasional frustration or anger that incites our wrath that in turn incites us to kill others, friends or strangers. It is contingent upon us constructing organisations like the UN to declare our moral opinions on killing globally. All the facts about human history and its tendency to generally oppose killing, imply that it is an opinion acquired through personal feelings and societal development.
And yet still, some think that insulting a dead prophet is enough to abrogate that moral opinion.
Let me state it explicitly:
Our morality on killing is arbitrary in the scheme of the cosmos – nobody out there cares, the stars do not care if we kill each other until the human race is extinct. There is no objective moral requirement in the cosmos that demands we should not kill. But, there are evolved and socially developed reasons, opinions, that we have come to feel very strongly about, that humans should not, on the whole, kill each other.
The religious or cosmologically determined objective moral truths are nothing of the sort. They are subjective human opinions about the sources of morals.
Some humans feel so strongly about these sources of morality that they treat these opinions about sources, and opinions about morals, as if they were objective moral truths, as if the facts about these moral ideas can be found, somewhere out there, in or from God, or in the cosmos – but they are never found there, they are only ever imagined to be found there.
But, it is a contingent observable fact, an objective fact about human behaviour, that humans have on the whole come to treat the requirement not to kill as a moral fact.
Humans have invented and hold to a subjective (personally, and culturally) moral opinion, that we should not kill, and hold it so strongly that many mistakenly take it as a moral fact.
But note the important distinction here:
That killing is wrong is an opinion held by humans.
It is an objectively observable fact that many if not most humans have that opinion.
It is an objectively observable fact that many humans feel so strongly about it, and are so unable to see the source of our moral opinions, that they take killing to be wrong as an objective fact about the cosmos or about what gods think.
It is not an objective fact that killing is wrong in any sense other than the sense that it's a strongly held opinion.
It is an objectively observable fact that many humans will find convenient exceptions to this general rule that they hold to, that killing is wrong.
We, as humans, have opinions about morality and concoct subjective opinions. The above are the observable objective facts about the subjective opinions of morality that we concoct. They include some explanation for why humans think there are moral truths independent of that, and some explanation about the ways in which we are mistaken.
This subjective/objective business seems to confuse some, but it's fairly straight forward once you get it, so it's worth restating it:
There are objective discoverable facts about humans.
One such (simplified) objective fact is that humans concoct subjective opinions they sometimes feel are objective facts about the world.
There is no discoverable (or discovered as yet) cosmological objective fact that it is wrong to kill.
There is a human-relative subjective opinion that killing is wrong, and this is (likely) to be the result of evolutionary and social objective facts about human development that we have been discovering for millennia.
There are no gods and no cosmologically available moral facts, that we have found.
Really, there aren't. Show evidence for them, if you think there are. Sorry, your holy book that asserts there are doesn't count any more than the thousands of other cooked books.
Don't just declare that your holy book tells you about God. That a holy book self-declares its own truth should be setting off big alarm bells in your epistemology. A liar writes a book that declares the liar is telling the truth? How would you distinguish a liar's bible from a genuine bible? Evidence? Well, where's this evidence? Will it lead me to the hearsay of Josephus, or will you use the reasoning of William Lane Craig, who will then lead me to Josephus and other nonsense? C. S. Lewis? Mohammed? Oh please. But by all means, let's go down a few of those rabbit holes if you like.
Are you a non-theist moral facts person? Are your moral facts absolute, written in the cosmos? Where? What physical laws best model your moral facts?
The consequences of all this can be disconcerting to theologians and philosophers alike, and to many people that don't think about this stuff much.
There's a problem we have if we take the absolute moral facts view (god given or written in the stars). To say we 'ought' to do X is an assertion. But then one could ask any of the following:
"Why ought we to be concerned with morality?" This isn't merely meta-morality, which is ethics, but a sort of met-meta-morality.
"Ought I do X? If so, why? Ought I ought, to do X?"
"What's the moral fact basis upon which I should care about morality at all?"
It becomes circular. The moral opinion based on our evolved feelings and social development is much more coherent. But is morality that arbitrary?
It seems that arbitrary, on the scale of the cosmos. The stars do not appear to cry out when humans kill each other in large numbers. In fact no other earthly animals seem to care either. We are the only ones that appear to care, if we do at all.
There could be some small scale operational fact about the universe, on the scale of physics and chemistry, such that when biological brains evolve in groups of sexually reproductive animals like us there is a tendency to prefer not killing over killing, based on the evolution of survival and empathy and theory of mind. This 'emergent' phenomenon might exist. But as yet we really don't know that this is how brainy species must evolve – it is totally speculative, and does nothing to help the religious or philosophical opinion that moral opinions are in fact facts.
Of course, it's not that arbitrary, for us. It is the case that humans do want to survive, they do have empathy, and do have a theory of mind; and these and other factors all come together to make us create cultures (many times, independently) where 'not killing', at least within the culture, is valued and elevated to a moral code. But that's about as objective as it gets.
Does that mean there is really nothing stopping you killing when you want to?
No there isn't, not really, not in some cosmic or god given sense. There is nothing that demands that you should not kill.
Some people are prepared to kill and have no problem doing so. In the past we tended to call them all evil, based on our religious notions of that concept. But now we know there are some categories of human brain that do not have the inhibitions most of us have, nor the empathy to drive such inhibitions.
Some people have brains that have no problem killing, and it's perhaps to the credit of our moral systems that they don't kill more often. We have built police services, armies, laws, courts of law, prisons and lots of other mechanisms to persuade those of us not convinced by the not killing code to actually not kill.
But it takes a particular type of mind, or a mind under some particular conditions, to actually kill; and so mostly we don't kill. Except for a number of very densely populated cities and some areas of conflict, like war zones, killing is quite rare. There are about 3 million people living in my Greater Manchester home, and not so many people are murdered – it's news when they are. Even in cities with a high murder rate, it's still a tiny fraction of the city population that do the murdering, and very few murder more than a small number of times. War zones are exceptions and news. And yet, when it comes to hand to hand combat the killing is small scale, and so only weapons of medium or mass destruction kill many people at once.
The Nazis were a modern exception that mechanised killing on a far more personal scale. Other genocides are occasionally personally brutal. And there's a whole other subject about how otherwise decent people can be incited to kill other humans with such ease.
Sadly, as well as for personal gain and power, political and religious ideologies have played a big part in motivating people to kill when they otherwise would not. It seems some otherwise very good people can be persuaded to kill quite easily, in the right circumstances. Look at some of the smart young kids persuaded to join ISIS and kill for their religion.
Religions have helped prevent killing, with their imaginary god given law, but have also been a significant excuse for killing. And still are. They have outlived their overall utility. The brutality of religions was once hidden among the barbaric social systems that were less opposed to killing. But now, religious barbarity stands out like a sore thumb.
We need to improve education with philosophy and morality and science, to explain who we are and why we don't want to kill. The naturalistic reasons presented above are enough. Develop those into humanist principles and we don't need religion.
The non-religious answers aren't absolute, and are not guaranteed to stop all the killing. But religion doesn't stop it anyway, clearly. It seems like there's a good chance that a better education, a reduction in religious indoctrination to remove the temptation to allow religion to increase divisiveness and encourage killing, could move us to a generally better world.
But we have to understand what morality is, and why we want it. We have to get rid of this religious scaremongering that tells us we're off to hell in a hand cart were it not for religion. It's nonsense. We can have moral opinions, and we can reason about them to improve them. And we can elevate them to moral codes of conduct that are backed up by law.
We don't need to uplift morality into some cosmic or god given truth or fact – or to some is/ought distinction. The objectivity of our morality lies within the personal subjective experience of our common human nature. We may have only contingent facts and truths that we must adapt in the light of evidence – but that's all we have. We are empirical moral humanists, with some common moral opinions.
Not all our opinions are the same, even with regard to killing. Morality becomes even more clearly a matter of opinion when we get down to lesser moral dilemmas. Property is theft? Words are violence? Not complying my choice of pronouns is a hate crime? I appreciate it's very easy to get your moral knickers in a twist. We can do better. And we can do much better than religions have: we can use reason, evidence and good arguments as to why some moral codes make sense, and why others do not.
is/ought
Published March 3, 2015 February 16, 2020
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5 thoughts on "Moral Facts and Opinions"
Asher Kay says:
Here's a thought — most people are freaked out by the sort of moral relativism you're talking about because it makes moral opinions arbitrary.
You say above that you can make arguments against FGM in terms of harm — but people will respond that the fact that we consider harm a bad thing is also just an opinion – like whether we like pork or not.
So I think it's useful to recognize that we have the desire to ground moral opinions in some way so that our arguments aren't arbitrary.
I think you already sort of hit on the way to do that:
"We feel it about ourselves, because we are survival machines – hey, who wants to be killed?"
That we are survival machines is as close to a necessary moral fact as we are likely to find. If we weren't survival machines, we'd be extinct — therefore all species are survival machines.
A lot follows from that fact about what it's possible for us to disagree about in terms of harm. From that fact, things get a lot more messy and complex, but it does provide a minimal basis for the origin of "ought". It's a sort of minimal moral realism.
Hi Asher,
"That we are survival machines is as close to a necessary moral fact as we are likely to find."
I still see that we are survival machines to be a biological fact. That we want to survive is a fact too, about those specific machines. That we express that fact, and invent opinions about that fact, is a fact about how those opinions come about. When we feel really strongly about these things we invent rules. These rules become facts about our rule system. That's all "ought" means: it's about certain types of "is". My main objection in this post is to the notion that "ought" is something different in kind from an "is" rather than this elevated "is". I still don't see the need for a moral fact that isn't, in fact, a moral opinion.
On moral relativism. Because humans are unique individuals – across all humans, and in the same human over time – moral opinions vary. Moral relativism is inevitable. That's why I refer to this descriptive observation moral relativism of humans having different moral values. Prescriptive moral relativism is the claim that because of this descriptive observation we are not entitled to have our moral opinions hold sway over others – hence, FGM is 'their' cultural moral truth and so we should not western imperialist noses in where it isn't wanted, which is the common imperialist guilt trip excusing acts that under western scenarios would be objected to strongly by the same people. Prescriptive moral relativists can be awfully confused as a result – how do you deal with immigrants from other culture enjoying the freedom to carry out FGM in our western culture.
On the cosmological scale there is no moral wrong with moral relativism. It is yet another moral opinion of mine that prescriptive moral relativism is sometimes immoral in practice, because of its inconsistency across cultures and in mixed culture, failing to support yet other moral opinions, like the right to freedom from harm.
The way I deal with moral relativism, accepting it's all opinion, and arguing for my opinion above opinions of others, actually eases the moral problem. I don't have to argue my unsupported asserted moral absolutism of my god against some other theist's unsupported asserted moral absolutism – an argument for which there is no resolution. I don't have to accept prescriptive moral relativism the way someone who commits to prescriptive moral relativism does, and so avoiding their confusion and contradictions.
Making morality a matter of opinion based on facts about the world, including facts about harm and so on, is just like any science based argument and opinion on the weight of evidence. Humans already disagree on the 'external (cosmos/God) moral facts' view, but there's no way to resolve that. At least with the opinion perspective we can bring evidence to the argument – evidence about the suffering of FGM victims.
The actual problem we have in practice then is arguing with someone that does hold that the value of FGM is a moral fact supported by their religion, which they feel is more important than the harm to the victims. So then we have to argue why their religion is unevidenced, and argue that it's harms do outweigh their god's sketchy existence. This is an example of why it is morally good to argue against religious belief – an opinion too, of course.
There's another problem we have if we take the moral facts view. To say we 'ought' to do X is an assertion. But then one could ask, "Why ought we to be concerned with morality?" This isn't merely meta-morality, which is ethics, but a sort of met-meta-morality. We're basically asking, "Should I do X? If so, why? Ought I ought, to do X?" This is what comes of trying to set out morality as something other than opinion.
Everything is based on opinions emotionally driven by our humanism – assuming typical empathetic humans. The only reason we win out over sociopaths with brains that don't get empathy is by shear numbers.
If we lived in a world where sociopathy was the norm, we weak stomached empathy fools would be ridiculed. One might wonder if there would be something called morality in such a world, rather than just some flimsy code of agreement to avoid being killed while sleeping.
Morality is messy. Moral systems that as supposedly based on objective morals that are different from "is" and are some special "ought" only complicate matters.
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Ebenezer Suresh says:
Reblogged this on Freethinkers Notes and commented:
"Moral facts" are an oxymoron
Morality is an opinion, literally, it's a set of standards given a special name. Treating it like a fact won't make it a fact.
Facts are more or less of a way of thinking than is it a body of knowledge. I'm sure you've learned what the scientific method is in school.


text:
«Об этом забывать нельзя» — советский художественный фильм, вышедший в 1954 году.

Сюжет
Действие происходит после Великой Отечественной войны в одном из городов Западной Украины. Видный украинский писатель-коммунист Александр Гармаш написал книгу, в которой заклеймил врагов мира. Пользуясь приёмами идеологической диверсии, иностранная агентура стремится вывести из строя писателя-борца, организуя через местную газету его травлю. Однако поскольку поколебать стойкость писателя не удаётся, враги пытаются убить Гармаша. Осуществить свои коварные планы им мешает бдительность советских людей. Параллельно с основной драматической коллизией в фильме разворачивается линия студента-поэта Ростислава Данченко, которого враги пытаются втянуть в преступную деятельность.

В основу фильма положена реальная история жизни Ярослава Галана (1902—1949), украинского писателя и публициста, непримиримо боровшегося с националистами и клерикальными церковниками-униатами. В 1949 году он был зверски убит на свой квартире во Львове националистами-оуновцами. В фильме в соответствии с царившей в те годы в советском искусстве теорией бесконфликтности герой остаётся жив.

В ролях
 Сергей Бондарчук — Александр Гармаш, писатель
 Лидия Смирнова — Анна Дашенко
 Ольга Жизнева — Евдокия Гармаш
 Елена Гоголева — Мария Бантыш
 Николай Плотников — Всеволод Ярчук, доцент университета
 Александр Хвыля — Леонид Коршун, ректор университета
 Валентина Ушакова — Галина Коршун, комсорг
 Вячеслав Тихонов — студент-поэт Ростислав Данченко
 Николай Крючков — Родион Егоров, шофёр
 Вера Орлова — Глаша, домработница
 Борис Тенин — Марьян Максимович, следователь
 Юрий Лавров — Николай Вольский, резидент
 Лаврентий Масоха — Фёдор Бойко
 Георгий Юматов — студент

Фильмы СССР 1954 года
Фильмы киностудии имени М. Горького
Чёрно-белые фильмы СССР
Фильмы-биографии СССР
Фильмы:Персонаж:Ярослав Галан

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Emmett Moore with "Fracture" at Gallery Diet
Design | May 25, 2016 |
Image courtesy of Gallery Diet
Gallery Diet is proud to announce Fracture, Emmett Moore's second solo exhibition at the gallery. On display are sculptures and panels that reference Moore's design practice and the formal qualities of modernist and Minimalist sculpture, while taking visual cues from Miami's environs. The title of the exhibition refers to the surfaces of the forms, but also hints phonetically at the combination of fractal and architecture.
At the center of the show is a series of wall – mounted concrete panels that are folded to mimic architectural elements. Using the one – foot square concrete block as a starting point (such as those seen in Florida's iconic breeze-block designs), Moore makes simple variations – crease lines, bevel cuts, 45-degree rotations – to create a wall sculpture. In a second series, grids of white mortar tiles are carefully interrupted at certain angles, to appear fractured but to fit seamlessly together in a system of junctures and unions.
Both of these series are made with a unique material cocktail that includes cement, water-based resin, fiberglass, and colored dye. Also on view is a panel made from overlapping layers of perforated stainless steel, offset at an angle to create disorienting visual effects. The most direct reference to architecture is the pair of sculptures that mimic steel awnings, featuring just the metal armature without any fabric covering, set freestanding in the middle of the gallery. Fracture displays Moore's flexibility as a producer of objects.
Hesitant to differentiate between art and design, he recalibrates these familiar structures in a way that is not immediately recognizable. This show expands his scope as it finds him focusing on architecture, in addition to the design objects for which he is best known. Looking at architects such as Carlo Scarpa and Minimalist artists such as Frank Stella, Moore takes puts economy of materials through novel production techniques to generate these works. Fracture explores how systems – industrial, geometric, utilitarian – are formed, break down, and can be transformed into something new.
Gallery Diet, Miami
May 12th – Jun 25th
more. gallerydiet.com
JEFF KOONS: SHINE
Art | January 8, 2022
This autumn, Palazzo Strozzi in Florence will host a major exhibition by Jeff Koons opening on 2 October 2021. Read more

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
TimeML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the TimeML Specification  version 1.2.1  developed by several efforts, led in large part by the Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation at Brandeis University.

The TimeML project's goal is to create a standard markup language for temporal events in a document. TimeML addresses four problems regarding event markup, including time stamping (with which an event is anchored to a time), ordering events with respect to one another, reasoning with contextually underspecified temporal expressions, and reasoning about the length of events and their outcomes.

History
TimeML was conceptualized in 2002 during the TERQAS (Time and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems) workshops, organized by Professor James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University. The TERQAS Workshops set out to address the problem of how to enhance natural language question answering systems to answer temporally-based questions about the events and entities in news articles. During these workshops, TimeML version 1.0 was defined, and the TimeBank corpus was created as an illustration.

In 2003, the TANGO (TimeML Annotation Graphical Organizer) workshops produced a graphical annotation tool for TimeML.

The TARSQI (Temporal Awareness and Reasoning Systems for Question Interpretation) project currently develops algorithms that tag events and time expressions in natural language texts, anchor them temporally, and order them.

Versions
According to the official TimeML website, there are currently three versions of the TimeML specification language, although it is rumored that other versions exist.

Version 1.1
TimeML version 1.1 was produced in 2004.

Version 1.2
TimeML version 1.2 was produced in 2004, shortly after the release of version 1.1.

Version 1.2.1
In 2005, version 1.2.1 was defined. There were several changes made to the language, and are described in the version 1.2.1 TimeML guideline as such:
The nf_morph attribute that was part of MAKEINSTANCE has been changed to pos (part of speech), and the PRESPART, PASTPART, and INFINITIVE elements of nf_morph redistributed to tense.
The optional syntax attribute was added to SLINK, ALINK, and TLINK. Syntax can be used to hold CDATA, but is generally only used by annotation programs to hold the data that led to the creation of the tag.
The optional comment attribute was added to all TimeML elements, for the purpose of giving (human) annotators a place to put observations about annotated text.

ISO-TimeML
ISO-TimeML was presented to the ISO for consideration as a standard in August 2007. It was then revised, voted on, and approved as an international standard by March 2009.

Work Group Members
James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University (Editor)
Rob Gaizauskas
Graham Katz
Bob Ingria
Jose Castaño
Roser Saurí
Anna Rumshisky
Inderjeet Mani
Antonio Sanfilippo
Dragomir Radev
Patrick Hanks
Marc Verhagen
Beth Sundheim
Andrea Setzer
Frank Schilder
Jerry Hobbs

TimeML Tags
The following tags defined by the TimeML specification version 1.2.1.

TIMEML
The TIMEML tag is similar to the root tag in an XML document. It declares that the rest of the document surrounded by the TIMEML tag is encoded with TimeML tags.

EVENT
The EVENT tag is used to annotate those elements in a text that mark the semantic events described by it. Syntactically, EVENTs are typically verbs, although event nominals, such as "crash" in "...killed by the crash", will also be annotated as EVENTs. The EVENT tag is also used to annotate a subset of the states in a document. This subset of states includes those that are either transient or explicitly marked as participating in a temporal relation. See the TimeML annotation guidelines for more details.

TIMEX3
The TIMEX3 tag is primarily used to mark up explicit temporal expressions, such as times, dates, durations, etc. It is modeled on Setzer's (2001) TIMEX tag, as well as the TIDES (Ferro, et al. (2002)) TIMEX2 tag. Since it differs both in attribute structure and in use, it seemed best to give it a separate name, which reveals its heritage while at the same time indicating that it is different from its forebears.

SIGNAL
The SIGNAL tag represents a temporal signal. These are any function
words that suggest a particular temporal relationship. Example SIGNALs are: when, in, after.

TLINK
TLINKS, or Temporal Links establish relationships between two or more events for the purpose of ordering them in time. Temporal links are the most prevalent as they show how the TimeML elements (events and temporal expressions) are temporally related to each other.

ALINK
Events that are marked as ASPECTUAL introduce an ALINK or Aspectual Link. These links are quite straightforward as they only occur when an aspectual event has another event as an argument. For example, in the sentence "Mary completed the marathon", "completed" is an aspectual event while marathon is an occurrence.

SLINK
Like the ALINK, SLINKs (Subordinate Links) are only introduced by certain event classes, namely reporting events, intensional events (I ACTION and I STATE), and perception events. Additionally, these events must subordinate another event by taking it as an argument. SLINKs are used essentially to allow for temporal relationships to be given even for events that may or may not have happened. For example, reporting events such as "said" introduce an EVIDENTIAL SLINK. Consider the sentence ""He didn't even stop," one witness said". Here the "stop" event is being subordinated by the "said" event.

References

External links
The Generative Lexicon
TimeML Specification Language
Professor James Pustejovsky's website
Brandeis University Computer Science Department

Markup languages
World Wide Web Consortium standards
Bibliography file formats
Computer file formats
Data modeling languages
Data serialization formats


Triumph launches its Street Scrambler in India.
Triumph Motorcycles has launched its Street Scrambler in India with a price tag of Rs 8.1 lakh (ex-showroom). The latest member of the modern classic family is based on the existing Street Twin but gets some off-roading characteristics as well.
The British bikemaker already had a Scrambler model based on the popular Bonneville in its product list. However, the new one looks much better and gets improved technology as well.
The new model looks inspired by the customised Scrambler model that was ridden by Chris Pratt in the Hollywood movie 'Jurassic World.' While the body work has also been carried forward from the Street Twin, the new Street Scrambler looks different with lots of minor changes.
The metal fuel tank gets knee-pad grip inserts for a better hold and the handlebar has also been raised a bit. The bike gets a split seat and its pillion part is interchangeable with an aluminium rack. The high mounted twin exhaust pipes and the classic wire-spoke wheels complete the scrambler look of the bike.
The spoke wheels come shod with dual sport tyres for optimum performance in both on- and off-road riding conditions. The front wheel is also a larger, 19-inch one to serve the purpose well and there is an engine guard provided for durability of the crankcase.
Powering the bike is the same 900cc, liquid-cooled, parallel twin engine that also powers the Street Twin and the Bonneville T100. Mated to a five-speed gearbox, the eight-valve motor makes 55PS and delivers a peak torque of 80Nm at just 2,850rpm.
The chassis is suspended on 41mm telescopic forks at the front and twin rear shocks with adjustable preload. Braking duties are handled by a 255mm disc brake at the rear and a 310mm unit up front, both with a two-piston Nissin caliper. Switchable ABS comes as a standard safety feature for both units.
The Triumph Street Scrambler features a single-pod, multifunctional instrument display along with handle-mounted function keys. Traction Control, Ride-by-Wire and torque assist clutch are among the other key standard features of the motorcycle.
In India, the Street Scrambler will compete with the likes of the Ducati Scrambler series, especially the Urban Enduro and the new Desert Sled variants.


Beautiful high quality impressive Korean jade sterling silver cufflinks. Serpentine–also known as Korean Jade is a fine natural mineral stone.
These large, good, strong and very impressive Korean Jade cufflinks are suitable for formal occasions or very smart casual wear. Unusual stone and quite rare..


The Wilko Blox Cops and Robbers Building Brick Set has everything you need to stage a getaway and police chase. The chase is on for this police officer. Follow the sneaky crooks leaving a bank robbery in their getaway truck as they head to their secret hideout. Everything's included to construct a secret hideout with opening doors, figures, vehicles and accessories. With Blox, see what else you can build - you don't just have to follow the instructions, set your imagination free to see what else you can create! Blox construction kits have been designed to work together with the leading brand. Warning:Not suitable for children under 36 months. Small parts.


Enjoy a truly stress-free arrival in Indianapolis with the luxury of a safe and reliable transfer.
See the sights of Indianapolis as you drive into the city.
All drivers have excellent experience and a wealth of knowledge of Indianapolis. So if you have any questions, simply ask. Whether you'd prefer music, talking or simply snoozing after a long journey, your driver will get you to the right destination.


February 11, 2015 This article courtesy of Nature News.
Scientists pinpoint genes behind famous beak variations.
Researchers have sequenced the genomes of all 15 species of Darwin's finches, revealing a key gene responsible for the diversity in the birds' beaks. The study, published online in Nature this week1, also redraws the family tree of these iconic birds, whose facial variations helped Charles Darwin to formulate his theory of natural selection.
The finches are endemic to Ecuador's Galapagos archipelago and Costa Rica's Cocos Island. Their beaks are adapted to their preferred food: warbler finches, for example, spear insects with thin, sharp beaks, whereas ground finches crack open seeds with strong, blunter beaks. The birds are a textbook example of adaptive radiation, in which a single ancestor responds to a selective pressure — in this case, food availability — by diversifying into several species.
Darwin was the first to note this, during his groundbreaking 1831–36 voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. "One might really fancy," he wrote in his diary, "that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends." Almost two centuries later, his early suspicions have been widely confirmed.
Initially, the finches were classified on the basis of their physical characteristics. More recently, it has incorporated variations in key DNA sequences. But nobody had compared whole-genome data from all 15 species until a team led by Leif Andersson, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden, analysed samples from 120 individual birds. "When we did the whole DNA sequence of all the species, we could redraw that tree," he says.
Overall, the researchers found good agreement with current taxonomy, but also some interesting deviations. For example, they conclude that the ground finch Geospiza difficilis, which is spread across six islands, actually comprises three species.
Andersson's team also discovered extensive mixing of genes between species. This is in line with field observations of hybrid birds made by study co-authors Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists at Princeton University in New Jersey who have worked in the Galapagos for decades. The genomic data reveal that the birds have been crossbreeding throughout their evolutionary history.
Darwin famously sketched his initial idea of phylogeny as a branching tree, above which he wrote "I think". Now, says Peter Grant, "he might wish to redraw that tree by making connections between some of the branches, representing the hybridization and gene exchange".
By looking at closely related finches that have different beak shapes, the researchers were able to pinpoint the genes responsible for beak morphology. One of those genes, ALX1, is involved in the facial development of vertebrates, including fish and mammals. In humans, for example, loss of ALX1 leads to severe facial deformities2.
In the finches, the gene displayed two distinct variants that matched up neatly with beak shape. Individuals from a species with a highly variable beak shape — the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) — had a mixture of the blunt and pointed gene variants. The finding dovetails nicely with work by the Grants that documents the species' rapid evolution as recently as the 1980s, when a drought affected the bird's food supply and its beak started to become more pointed to accommodate a new diet3.
Andersson suspects that ALX1 drove that adaptation, but others say the picture is more complicated. Beaks "differ in many parameters, not just being blunt or pointed", says Ricardo Mallarino, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Functional studies of ALX1 should help to reveal exactly what the gene controls, he says. His colleague, evolutionary biologist Arkhat Abzhanov, says that ALX1 may be especially important for finches with very specialized beaks.


text:
International Leadership Conference Held in Nigeria
Written by UPF-Nigeria
Abuja, Nigeria - An International Leadership Conference on the theme "One Family under God: A New Vision for Peace in the 21st Century" was held at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, the capital of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This event, which was part of the Global Peace Tour 2009, drew participants from across Nigeria, including Ambassadors for Peace and other dignitaries.
Among the dignitaries was Chief Amb. Segun Olusola, former Nigerian Ambassador to Ethiopia, Founder and Patron of the African Refugees Foundation, and Chairman of the UPF-Nigeria Board of Trustees, who served as the chairman of the event. Other speakers included Senator Dr. Tari Sekibo, also a member of the UPF Board of Trustees. Assistant Inspector General of Police Mrs. Okoronkwo represented the Inspector General of Police Mr. Mike Okiro as the Guest of Honor.
Chief Olusola threw light on the core values of the UPF, which he summarized as: spirituality, love, and service to all. Reminiscing on the violent clashes between Christians and Muslims last December in Jos, Plateau State, Chief Olusola stressed the need for proactive peace building by civil society organizations. He assured everyone that UPF was open and committed to working together with all and sundry on programs that promote peace. He also used the opportunity to call on the nation to support the government of President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua in realizing its Seven-Point Agenda toward the development of the nation.
George M. Ogurie spoke on the topic: "Spiritual Values as a Foundation for Leadership." The presentation touched on the implications of each of our actions on the afterlife. With this in mind, he pointed out that if an Ambassador for Peace should incite people into acts capable of causing a breach of the peace, he or she automatically loses the moral right to that title, even if he or she displays all the paraphernalia of an Ambassador for Peace.
In the second session, two representatives of the Interfaith Mediation Centre, a Muslim-Christian Dialogue Forum in Kaduna, Rev. Bitrus Dangiwa and Imam Mohammad Sani Isah, made presentations on "Promoting Interfaith Cooperation and Conflict Resolution or Building God-centered Marriages and Families." They represented Imam Ashafa Mohammed and Pastor James Wuye. Imam Ashafa and Pastor James were erstwhile militants who fought each other in a violent conflict between Christians and Muslims in the northern Nigerian City of Kaduna some eight years ago. They both reconciled are working together to promote interfaith cooperation.
A high point of this session was a drama presentation by Epoch Group depicting the union of a Christian family and Muslim family through marriage. The son of a Christian family intends to marry the daughter of a Muslim family. The two young people are in love, but this is unacceptable to the Muslim family. Unknown to both parents, the young man is the son of a man who had performed an act of true love at an early age by donating one of his kidneys to none other than the man who happens to be the father of his would-be daughter-in-law. When the two parents came across each and discovered who would become their in-laws, no religious difference could stop the marriage. True love had prevailed. The drama was beautifully presented. Some participants shed tears. Nigeria has a well-developed drama industry.
During the discussion session, Dr. Emmanuel Akpan (a medical doctor) said something that reflected the general mood of the participants: "I was a victim of religious riots in Kano several years ago, and I know how strongly the protagonists can express hatred toward each other. I am amazed to see these two gentlemen embracing each other on stage, sharing a podium and calling on everyone to eschew bitterness and hatred in the name of religion. I can't believe this is happening in Nigeria. Everyone should learn about a program like this. I thank the UPF for providing this kind of forum."
Participants were also treated to traditional folk music and dance as well as choral music by the UPF-Nigeria Choral Group. At the end, ten participants were appointed Ambassadors for Peace, and Ambassadors for Peace certificates were presented to them. Some of the recipients were: Alhaji (Dr.) Mohammed Imam Yahaya (OFR); Rev. Bitrus Dangiwa and Imam Mohammad Sani Isah of the Interfaith Mediation Centre; Alhaji Abubakar Abdulahi Tafida, CEO of PHCN PLC Kano; Alhaji Idris Mohammed; Engr. A. G. Umar CEO of PHCN Abuja; and Engr. Ahmed Rufai Yusuf.
Rev. Dr. George Ikpot, M.C. of the event, expressed satisfaction at the quality of the participants and their level of enthusiasm and attention. He praised the presenters for the quality of the presentations that kept the participants so attentive and active.
The event was covered as a news event by the Nigerian Television Network, which has a viewership of over 30 million. Local Abuja radio stations such as Radio Nigeria, Abuja, and Ray-Power 91.5 FM also covered the event as news.
On-going programs embarked upon before this time included a courtesy visit to First Lady, H.E. Hajia Turai Yar' Adua on March 17, by a team of women Ambassadors for Peace under the banner of Women for Peace International, an initiative of UPF. The visit was made in company of a group of orphans from several orphanages around Abuja.
Other on-going programs include a Zebra-Crossing marking program in Lagos at a point on a road where children cross to enter into their school compound. This was organized by Women's Federation for World Peace-Nigeria in Lagos.
For the keynote address and more information about the peace tour, click here.
Asia Pacific First Ladies Summit Convened in Palau
Koror, Palau—Eight current and former first ladies as well as more than 500 delegates from 38 nations attended the Asia Pacific First Ladies Summit 2019 in Palau.
Africa Continental Summit Convened in Niger
Niamey, Niger—The national and international delegates included current and former heads of state and government from 70 nations across Africa and around the world.
World Leaders Address Asia Pacific Summit 2019 in Cambodia
Phnom Penh, Cambodia—More than 800 delegates, including current and former heads of state and government, from 46 nations attended the Asia Pacific Summit 2019 in Cambodia.


Gage, of course, complied, but Tracy merely abstained from the division, with the result that he was replaced in 1741 by John Martin, also a government supporter. In 1747 both Members were opposition Whigs.
1. Rich. Freeman to Nic. Jackson, 7 July 1727, Jackson mss, Glos. RO.
2. 21 Sept. 1739, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss.
3. Lechmere mss, Worcs. RO.


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Future Festival - Louise Taylor
Louise Taylor is a British freelance photographer, focusing on the surrounding areas of Britain and documenting stories about the people within it. Taylor is also a founding member of the art collective 'Wideyed' with Lucy Carolan and Richard Glynn. Producing photographic series on a international level, they have created bodied of work for communities and photographic festivals.
During the Future Festival, Taylor came to talk about her stylist approach to photography and her passion for community based series. One series that stood out was the 'Shoot!' photography project focusing on a group of small pheasant and partridge shooting syndicates from her local district of Tow Law, County Durham. The series has a selection of images from working days to shooting days. Taylor's series portrays the relationship between not just the locals but also the dogs involved showing their deep connection and love for the animals.
Taylor's photographic passion for connecting with people is illustrated within her work, showing the lives of communities and the connections within them. From the talk, Taylor expressed that most of her work is self funded and sometimes its can be difficult to produce the series she desire to publish as the funding aspect becomes a challenge. However, though the many connection Taylor has across the UK, the commitment to show the stories demonstrates her enthusiasms to connect with more people and portray their stories in a nation sense.
This blog serves to document the recent lectures/ trips taken and the photographic practice but also the personal photographic work currently being undertaken.


text:
package org.scrutmydocs.webapp.service.settings.rivers.fs;

import org.scrutmydocs.webapp.api.settings.rivers.AbstractRiverHelper;
import org.scrutmydocs.webapp.api.settings.rivers.fs.data.FSRiver;
import org.scrutmydocs.webapp.api.settings.rivers.fs.helper.FSRiverHelper;
import org.scrutmydocs.webapp.service.settings.rivers.AdminRiverAbstractService;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

/**
 * River Service Implementation for File System Rivers (aka FS Rivers)
 * @author PILATO
 *
 */
@Component
public class AdminFSRiverService extends AdminRiverAbstractService<FSRiver> {
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

    @Override
    public AbstractRiverHelper<FSRiver> getHelper() {
        return new FSRiverHelper();
    }

    @Override
    public FSRiver buildInstance() {
        return new FSRiver();
    }

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Styled to please and with an eye for detail, this Innovative Home is situated in the popular Norfolk Downs subdivision and could be your new address. Featuring four generous bedrooms for the family with comfort in mind and a separate lounge with a gas fire. The family room is also of generous proportion and blends nicely into the dining area. For the family that likes to entertain there is a spacious out door area that is perfect for family gatherings, very private and versatile with shade from the sun and cover for the cooler months. Homes in this location are not often available so if Originality, Quality and Locality is important to you, view today.


-This overblown, unnecessary sequel has missed its window for being able to "wow" us with large-scale explosions.
What hurts about Independence Day: Resurgence is that its the type of sequel that manages to damage our nostalgic, comfortable view of the first film. Back in 1996, Roland Emmerich, a fairly new director at the time, managed to reinvigorate the disaster film with some good creature design, powerful speeching, and a sense of destruction and wonder that encapsulated the 90s craze of the alien invasion. It seemed like a sequel could've come at any moment over the last twenty years, but instead, we get it mired in a long summer of endless sequels, poor CGI, and murky screenwriting, and this disaster film has plenty of usefulness for its genre: it's a disaster alright.
It's as if Emmerich was ahead of his time and just waited for the rest of the industry to catch up. This film is the same as many of the others lately: big, dumb, and a lot of people die.
"We always knew they'd come back." Well, they are, and sliding through our solar system and into our planet are the slimy, tentacled war aliens from the 1996 film, now armed with better weaponry and a much bigger ship. Considering the proposed distance between the original attackers from this species and the arrival of the second wave, my guess is that their technology shouldn't be that updated because they would've had to leave for Earth, what, like 20 years ago? I digress.
Earth has changed, now using the advanced weaponry of the aliens as our primary source of destruction, we have fended off any problems since the '96 invasion. Now out of office, President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is now a bearded recluse, paranoid and predicting a return of the aliens. (In his place now is the first female president played by Sela Ward. I think that films have forgotten that us men can still be presidents too.) His daughter (Maika Monroe) works for Ward and also is a trained pilot, engaged to the second in command of the Air Force (Liam Hemsworth). The air-force leader is the step-son of the now-deceased Will Smith played by Jessie Usher, and Jeff Goldblum returns as David Levinson, the scientist in charge of keeping Earth safe from alien attacks. Other supporting players return as well from the previous film, including the immensely annoying Judd Hirsch as Goldblum's father.
This is a bit of an aside, but considering that this review is coming mostly as a stream of conscience following the viewing of this movie today, I can't help but feel like this could've been a very good, possibly better installment than the original. If we look at the lore that is attached to these aliens and their invasion, this could've been very exciting, especially with the integration of alien technology into our military. The result, however, is so stale that it fits right in with the useless pile of garbage that has been the 2016 summer in film.
The effects are bombastic, and that's fine, but it's just not possible to be wowed by explosions or imploding cities. Once you've seen one big disaster movie, you've kind of seen it all, and outside of the tasteful destruction in 2014's Godzilla, I'm not going to really be impressed by these battle scenes. In order to create stakes, we have to feel something for the characters and the world that's created, and we do, slightly, but our subconscious gives up on the material after fifteen or so shots of a giant ship ripping apart our planet. It just gets repetitive and boring. My point about the 'grey rubble climax' that dominates the modern blockbuster still stands. There's lots of smoke and grey rubble flying around while people die, cities are destroyed, and yet it all feels inconsequential. It's almost spooky how obsessed filmmakers are with killing us all off.
Our characters are fine, Goldblum and Pullman do everything they can to recreate the fun of the original without phoning it in too easily, but some of the other returning cast is really unnecessary, including an annoying subplot of Judd Hirsch with several young kids and the scientist Brent Spiner's quirky tone ruining the darker elements of the story. These kinds of films don't understand tone at all, when misfire humor takes us out of trying to establish the stakes for mankind's endurance.
It's really the new characters (minus the pretty awful Jessie Usher as Will Smith's step-son, but at least it isn't Jaden Smith) that carry the brunt of the movie, notably a decent Liam Hemsworth and the film's shining actor Maika Monroe of It Follows fame. Hemsworth's character acting with real people is always surprising, and he delivers some of the sturdiest lines in this and with the overrated 'Hunger Games' cycle of movies. If you take out his pretty awfully delivered cockpit screaming (there's a lot of OH NOs, AHs, OWs, and EEEs when navigating spacecraft), you get a structured performance where he does the best he can with the material. I like Liam Hemsworth, and I want him to get a real role at some point. Monroe has the most to lose, a crazed father bent on saving the planet and a brave fiancee who wants everything to do with courage. Her mixture of worry for her loved ones but fearlessness in her duty is commendable, and her performance has the most depth; she's definitely a face to look out for in terms of becoming big.
Yet, it's Emmerich and his team of TNT wielding computer cronies who dominate the film's image, tone, and events. It's another useless disaster movie in a sequel that deserved much better, and even the creature design of the original has been replaced by crisp CGI and laser-filled gunplay that takes the intimidation right out of the film's wheelhouse. Maybe a decent movie could've been made had Emmerich not left his brain at the door with the audience members who could possibly enjoy this piece of filth.


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Drunken Writtle arsonist jailed for suicide attempt that could have killed his disabled mother
Michael Bloomfield set fire to his room and told his mother "I want to die. You will die as well"
Michael Mutch
Michael Bloomfield has been jailed for 32 months
Get a weekly round up of all the biggest court and crime news in Essex
A drunken man who set fire to his own room to commit suicide and endangered the life of his disabled mother has been jailed.
Michael Bloomfield, 30, of Rectory Road in Writtle, appeared before Chelmsford Crown Court today (Friday, October 6) to be sentenced for committing arson with recklessness where life was endangered.
On May 23 this year Bloomfield had consumed copious amounts of alcohol after coming home from work.
In a drunken state he decided to set his room on fire in a bid to take his own life.
Colchester mum was found sat in front of six-foot flames after she torched her own home
Bloomfield lived with his mother Jackie, who is registered disabled and requires a frame to get about. She was asleep in her room at the time.
Jackie was woken up just after midnight when a smoke alarm went gone off. Bloomfield entered her bedroom and told her that he had set fire to his room.
She got up and walked into the bedroom with her son and noticed that he had set a rug on fire. She told him to put it out.
He said no, and began ripping up pages from a diary and adding them to the flames. She told him that he will make it worse.
Bloomfield told his mother: "That's what I want. I want to die. You will die as well."
Jackie struggled to get herself downstairs in a bid to escape the flames. When she did, she called the fire brigade before heading outside to safety.
When they arrived the fire was put out quickly and Bloomfield was arrested by Essex Police where he admitted he did it to kill himself.
Once he was interviewed at the police station, Bloomfield told officers that he was dependent on alcohol and cocaine. His addiction got worse after he had split up from his partner a few years before.
Basildon 'murder victim' named locally
Prosecutor Gareth Hughes told the court that Bloomfield had no previous convictions.
Defence barrister Gavin Capper told Judge Christopher Morgan that it was not the first time that Bloomfield attempted suicide.
He said: "He was clearly a person in some distress at the time and this is number three in the list of suicide attempts.
"He is a 30-year-old man of good character with some issues. He is somebody who has been using cocaine since the age of 18 and on a daily basis in the last two years."
Mr Capper continued to tell the judge that Bloomfield was "thankful" for being in prison since he committed his crime.
When Bloomfield was taken to prison, he noticed that there were people he knew on his wing that could supply him drugs. He asked the governor to move to another wing to resist the temptation.
Bloomfield's mother is willing to accept her son back into her home when he is released, the hearing was told.
Mr Capper told Judge Morgan that Bloomfield did not want to be released from prison if it damaged his rehabilitation.
However, he added that the best way to rehabilitate him was within the community.
Basildon man arrested on suspicion of murder after victim dies in hospital
Bloomfield stood in the dock to receive his sentence. Judge Morgan said: "Arson is a very serious offence.
"This offence is serious because you set fire to your room after having consumed a considerable amount of alcohol. Whether you considered the full consequences or not is difficult from your own words.
"Your mother was upstairs. You know she has mobility problems. Thankfully the smoke alarm went off which alerted your mother.
"This case is a serious one and it passes the custodial threshold. I will discount the sentence in your case to reflect the following.
"I treat you as a man of good character. This is not a case of dangerousness. You are addressing in prison your alcohol problems and that is to be encouraged.
"You should continue that in the sentence I am about to pass."
Judge Morgan sentenced Bloomfield to 32 months in prison. He will serve half of the sentence in custody before he is released on licence.