Are Philosophers lost in the clouds?

What you are missing is that this land of opportunity made many regular folks rich, and not all of them give money to influence our government. Many share their wealth with people of the world to do good works.

Your myopia gets very tiresome.

Cic, I have no problem with my eyes what ever, and even at 58 do not need glasses, and since I read constantly at every opportunity I chalk it up to exercise...

This land has made many more folks regular than it ever made regular folks rich, and it seems as though you would be aware that the distance between rich and poor is greater than ever... This land of so many regular millionaires has millions of households living on not half the poverty level of income... You know better than to tell me that in a closed system that the rich are not relative to the poor, for in the words of Montagne: the gain of one is the loss of another... It is this land that has been fruitful and not capital... Capital has reaped great fortunes and always left most of the people with enough... And it has destroyed and killed far more than it ever made rich....And now it is feeding on the future of this people, with both parties agreeing that there is not enough profit to pay taxes, nor enough of wages paid to support the government so that people not yet alive will be saddled with debt rather than those who cannot pay and those who will not pay... It does not work, and an intelligent guy like you should be able to figure that out... My guess is thay you are a liberal psychotic just as David or Waterette are reactionary psychotics... Each of you denies reality...

It's your brain that suffers from myopia.

Right and wrong does come with grey areas. Take the euthanasia debate in some countires or surrogacy. And we can't forget the death penalty... (I'm sure there are plenty more examples that fit into this grey area)

If Fido had bothered to remember what I have written on many of these boards, I'm neither liberal or conservative; I have voted for both democrats and republicans during the past 20 years plus. I'm a far left liberal when it comes to universal health care, but also believe in small government, and less involvement in world affairs in wars. I seek a much smaller defense department, and spend more money on infrastructure and our educational system.

There is something wrong with how corporate profits have been shifting towards the top with very little shared with the majority of workers - even when companies are profitable, and productivity of workers have been increasing. I blame the Board of Directors and CEO's for this condition; they have never learned about fairness and ethics, and to say "stop!"

Rachel Maddow said it best; "when the middle class does well, everybody does well - even the rich." This is a lesson lost on CEO's and Board of Directors.

The conservatives keep advocating for more tax cuts for the rich, because they claim taxing them only shifts their wealth to the poor. There's no cure for stupid; our national debt must be paid down, and the two wars GW Bush started were never paid for.

There are many "grey areas" in any society, whether it has to do with economics, politics or religion. That's a given, and a fact of life.

So your claim that right and wrong is easy to know isn't really that simple. There are factors known and unknown to contend with aswell as the matter of stating a case one firmly believes in against all manner of ridicule.

If you want to see an eye problem up close then bite my one eyed rat.

You must've missed my last paragraph. Here,

By grey areas, I would bet they are considered grey because of the seemingly infinite ability of a people to suck it up, and endure injustice and unhappiness because they think they are alone in being unhppy, or in feeling abused, so that, for the sake of peace, and for the benefits of society which even at worst are many, -people will endure much, suffer much; and only in the end will they revolt, and will in the act of insurection discover they are not alone...Every mob begins with so many isolated individual acting on individual impulse... It is out of necessity that grey areas are trampled in the necessity of people doing what is commonly considered immoral to affirm themselves and see themselves as moral...

In general terms that maybe so, but I think each specific issue concerning these "grey areas" has it's "stale mates" if you pardon the chess metaphor.

Pardon Granted, and Parol... Aritotle asked the question of whether anyone can be the willing victim of injustice...And forgive me if I am wrong in this since it has been a long time...What ever his conclusions were, set aside, It does not matter what is the relationship under consideration; not one may be considered as equal, with things being what they are and all people being unequal in character and ability... Yet some relationships have injustice as their defining characteristics, and still, people very often endure in these relationships because they have no choice but to make the best of bad situations, and because they are getting enough to survive day to day... It reminds me of a story from the age of Robber Barons, where one employer complained to the Railroad in California that their rates were putting him out of business, and they came back with something like: What can you pay??? It was not in their best interest to put anyone out of business and it was in their interest to charge as much as they might, and if the employer was willing to open his books to them, they were willing to open what passed for a heart, to him...

It is not in the interest of any society or government to put themselves out of business... A state in order to survive should manage all of the relationships of, and between the classes... The fact is, that one class firmly in charge does itself more harm than good, and more often than not destroys the relationship upon which their own survival depends...Feudalism was never destroyed from the bottom, and we find it resurging even in this country for people who prefer slavery to insecurity...Where Feudalism died, it had already been beaten by Monarchy, and then Monarchy found it often could not stand without the help of its lords... But; very often, Lords found themselves dispossessed not by the people, but by those who owned the mortages that could never never be paid by the nobility no matter how hard they pressed their people... The business classes bought Europe before they ever took possession of its institutions...The lords and kings had made themselves superfluous long before they walked off the stage or onto the scaffold..

There should be a stalemate of sorts between the classes, and that is because when one gets the upperhand, the dynamic tension that characterizes all relationships ends, then the relationship freezes into a form, and people begin to count on law to protect them while the justice that should make law is drawn out of it and sold for money... No one can break water, and nearly everyone can break ice, and so it is with societies that have become brittle and unchanging...

Not necessarily from only that perspective; grey areas exists, because people are subjective animals whether they belong in the same economic class, religious, or political party. A "conservative" can turn out to be more liberal dependent on how they view certain aspects of social benefits.

I can agree that very often the more intelligent and well off can be very liberal and even just because they have a more adult and developed sense of how societies should work while the most conserverative people of all are the poor who see nothing but death and disaster in the future, and they are rights but all the more so because their conservatism does not allow them to adapt to changing circumstances they would prefer to ignore...

What you say cannot be true... We are the least subjective of all animals so by no objective standard can we be considered subjective animals... The experience of a raccoon will always be personal, in a sense, since they are taught nothing in a formal sense, and are driven primarily by instinct so their view of life is theirs alone and beyond even the most primitive communication...... We deny the power of instinct, and teach knowledge acquired culturally in an objective fashion which means truth as we seek it must be agreeable to all and verifiable... Ultimately, all experience of life rests upon a subjective foundation, but that is simply a starting point for most because life and culture are social experience and we cannot at once be social and entirely or even mostly subjective... At some point, the subjective experience must mesh with the objective... We all see the same sun no matter how much we may experience it subjectively...

All animal behavior begins with instinct. The reasons why humans have progressed this far is based on our physiology (hands) and brains, and our ability to record information.

Humans are the most subjective animals on this planet; humans have the greatest freedoms to do most things other animals cannot.

The ability of humans to record and research our environment make us superior to other living things. No other living thing on earth can fly to the moon, or send rockets to mars.

Chimps have hands and brains as well; but they are lacking in the essential genes associated with speech... Still, they take certain situations as signs, so there may be no reason they could not learn to read or write... They have been around as long as we have, and they clearly have not got it on their own...

You may say that humanity advanced by stages, and that, in becoming animals of the savanna they also became hunters rather than hunted, but; even today travel is a challenge and an education... The greatest advance of humanity is language, and its child: culture... Culture is knowledge, and the ability to transmit knowledge from generation to generation is the beginning of science and technology... In a very real way, culture is also morality, and the nearer are people to nature the more their morality demands that they reject natural behavior, and actively do as no animal would do..

What you say of humans is simply not true... All other animals are more subjective than humans... They each experience a life unique to themselves without even the ability to share it through communication... To say we are the most subjective is to deny that we are the most objective, and that much at least is true... No other animal has any regard to objective, or universal truths, and the animals posing as human beings have no regard for objective or universal truth... They can treat other human beings as objects only because their experience of life is so isolated and subjective; but they are the exception...

What you say of no other living thing sending rockets or flying may well be true, but these activities so against nature, and causing nature so much damage are made possible by our objective sense of reality... The presumption that our environment is here and everywhere the same, is an objective conclusion making the search for universal laws possible... If we were even a fraction more subjective we would never even have determined the difference between objective and subjective reality... Even our conscious subjectivity, what most people would call individualism has its roots back in the breakdown of Roman/Greeks society when social happiness was thought impossible, and people grasped for the straw of self sufficiency, what to some groups, including the Christians came to be called ecstacy, though it has many synonyms... Subjectivity, like relativism is a condition that is forced upon people by the breakdown of forms...

None of us, even when determined to do so can have even the subjective experience of life as a mouse... That we should want it at all, and seek refuge in it is the greatest sign of social decadence... In a healthy form, people first seek to lose the individual for the group experience... Humans want to be outside themselves, and to be a part of something larger...Compare such people to the hypocondriacs and republicans of the world who can think of nothing else but themselves, and their own aches and pains... Such people are miserable and discouraging...

But it is a higher cloud that gives you a cockpit's view of what's going on on the ground, which is that much more empowering.

Philosophy to me, is that thing one does to ones own self.. In the event that many years have passed and one has tired of the hard cold stillness which is existence.

Whether one is perceived good, bad or merely irritating at it, is of zero consequence, because one does so for hours, days, weeks months or years, in ones free time. Others listening or reading it is not the issue.

I don't see philosophy in stark or absolute contrast to everyday thought and understanding; it is essentially the same but more rigorous and self-conscious. Our everyday cultural perspective or "worldview" is informal and conventional philosophy. Thank goodness we have individuals who spend their lives questioning our common sense assumptions and axioms. Some of them are professional philosophers, others are informal intellectuals, as I encounter on A2K.