On 14-7-2009 7:07, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> On 12-7-2009 8:04, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>>> andrel wrote:
>>>> I think the difference is significant. "I don't know" implies that 
>>>> you can still look for an answer, whereas "I can't know" means that 
>>>> the search ended. The former means that you are open to suggestions 
>>>> from others who claim that they know more, whereas the latter is a 
>>>> sound basis to build your own ethics.
>>>> I don't like the "I don't care".
>>>
>>> On the contrary, how is "I can't know" a grounds to build anything?
>>
>> Easy. If you are convinced that you can not know if God exists or not 
>> (which is what agnosticism is about, all your other examples are 
>> irrelevant here), it means that you have to build an ethics that will 
>> work in both cases. You can not assume there is someone else that 
>> knows better (a god or her representative on earth), nor can you be 
>> certain that you won't be judged after death on what you did in your 
>> entire life. That means that you have to think about what you are 
>> doing and you will have to make the right choice everytime by 
>> yourself. With 'right' defined by a much broader spectrum of ethics 
>> than that of a single religion. E.g. simply defining another group as 
>> non-human won't work. (i.e. if your current social environment allows 
>> you to recognize this as an item, but that is a whole different 
>> discussion.)
>>
>> Believe me, simply being one in a crowd of atheists or believers is 
>> much more simple. (BTW I am not an agnostic, in case you are wondering).
> 
> Uh.. But, in that case, you are not basing it on the "unknowability", 
> your doing it the same way that you would if no one had ever presented 
> the idea that one existed in the first place. You might as well claim 
> that you are, "building your system of ethics on a lack of being able to 
> know if there is a tea pot in orbit." Its a meaningless statement. Well, 
> unless you where describing it to someone that insists that all of 
> creation is defined by how many invisible tea pots are orbiting life 
> bearing planets, but, then its only meaningful in context of 
> "attempting" to explain it to the person making that assertion, which is 
> basically the same thing as saying, it is meaningless. lol

I think you missed the point completely. Or perhaps it is something that 
you have to understand before you can understand it. i.e. the 
philosophical equivalent of the mathematical 'trivial'.

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