Care to help ?
>To act morally, is it necessary to fight against one's desires?
I'm looking at this from two points of view, yes and no.
>yes
Our desires are irrational and could sometimes be immoral
Desire is something spontaneous without reason, acting morally depends on reason and conscious.
>no
since our desires can sometimes be morally right, for example to hep people or donate to charity
And i'm pretty much out, care to chime in?
InB4 OP fucks a child.
Search for Me, Myself, I, and Freud: A Game of Monopoly.
The first desire put forth by your subconscious is typically selfish, unless you have spent a long time recognizing this fact and reworking your selfish impulses. The impulse "help a girl being abused by her b/f" for example could stem from a selfish desire to get the g/f to find you attractive. It is reminiscent of the story of the monk that wants to save the butterfly from the spider. In saving the butterfly he damages the wings and now the butterfly dies because it can't fly.
...
Thanks, more?
wtf is this
Binning
>The impulse "help a girl being abused by her b/f" for example could stem from a selfish desire to get the g/f to find you attractive
In other words, I help her because I want to fuck her myself?
Sounds legit
You desire that she gets abused so that she can rely on you.
>To act morally
>I'm looking at this from two points of view
Congratulations, you've discovered how fickle the concept of morality is.
Exactly, but i'm trying to build a case with desires only, not other emotions, that's why i'm a little stuck for the "no" part.
We don't always have to fight our desires because ...
I only found 1 example.
>You desire that she gets abused so that she can rely on you.
Wait...
Do I help her THAT she gets abused by her b/f, or that I help her AFTER the fact that her b/f abused her?
Oh no i fucked up, it's help a girl while she is being abused, which sounds retardedd.
That might be complicated, because you'd be making a handful of categorical mistakes that way; you said you were trying to build a case with desires only. But, what are desires?
Desires come to us automatically, its a natural phenomenon. They don’t ask for our permission before entering in our mind
How does the process of coming to us automatically function? What needs to happen? In other words, what is a desire, as a phenomenon?
Just checking if you mean that I incite the situation in any form between them, so her b/f actually has a 'desire' to abuse her.
Because those things really happen
State of absence, we seek something that we think or know that will fulfill it.
I'm not the original OP, i just thought he meant i have a desire to help the girl whos being abused but at the same time i have a hidden desire to actually seduce her?
I guess.
Who says it has to be one answer or the other all of the time?
So what would you suggest?
Is desire is a state of absence, or is desire us seeking something to fulfill a sensed quality of absence? Do we seek that something, or is it something that happens automatically without our conscious effort that causes us to seek? In other words, which way does the arrow of causation flow, do we influence desire, or does it influence us?
There's no universal principle (or at least none that you can perceive). GNON runs this world, and we adapt or die.
Use your intelligence and knowledge of similar situations to influence your instinctive choices. Don't fall for pseudo-buddhist nonsense. Sometimes you'll be wrong anyways.
What kinda gay shut is that?
I don't know, gravity is pretty evident to me.
how is that relevant to what OP asked?
Moral principle. I've never heard anyone describe gravity or electromagnetism as a "principle".
Anyways, the literal answer to OP's question is "yes, sometimes". If you follow through with the desire to seduce your 15 year old neighbor, you may very well wind up suffering a great deal of misery.
Language games. Go back to freshman philosophy.
Interesting
I'm not talking about the consequences, just the moral act, to act morally, so yes and no, but i can't find any more arguments for the no part other than "sometimes our desires have a moral goal, thus they are morally right"
Thought I'd just come out with it.
>Our desires are irrational and could sometimes be immoral
>Desire is something spontaneous without reason
>acting morally depends on reason and conscious
>our desires can sometimes be morally right
If and only if desires are spontaneous, without reason, automatic, and independent of conscious thought or affect, then desire cannot be irrational, or immoral in of itself. It can't possess those qualities; desire would be amoral, and just amoral. Which will pose a serious problem if you are trying to depict a framework with which to operate morality upon, given a conscious being, known to be capable of rational and irrational acts in the same stroke- that is also subject to desires. Which, alone, carry no moral value assuming the above.
I was taking the roundabout way to say this so OP could think about it themselves and find the answer they want to reach, than just have me bark it out.
Well, you didn't say moral principle before, you just said universal principle.
>Language games
Don't quote me on this, but I think that you need to talk about semantics when you are taking about semantics, ontological or in the case of
>morals
genuinely philosophical.
>>To act morally, is it necessary to fight against one's desires?
Yes absolutely.
One could argue that all that matters are your own desires. You're just another animal on earth, not necessarily bound by any code beyond your own intrinsic biological perfection. In other words, you were built this way. Blame nature, blame god, it doesn't matter, you're acting according to your own chemical makeup. Being true to your purest self. The ethics and morality that existed before you were born will exist after you have died. They don't inherently apply to you, do they? We are born in a place with rules, but we each choose to follow them or face punishment by the others. Still we CHOOSE that.
>Yes absolutely.
Ok, i get it, but care to help with more arguments towards the "no" side?
Not really. I'd have a hard time even playing devil's advocate with this one. A desire being "morally right" is like a stopped clock being right twice a day, it's just a coincidence. Not fortunate or unfortunate, it just is. Like the asteroid that wiped out 60 million years worth of dinosaur evolution. A horrible fate, a terrible waste, but without it we wouldn't be here. Good or bad? Only depending on your subjective experience.
Though I should add.
>I've never heard anyone describe gravity or electromagnetism as a "principle"
I have: Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. In being that the scientific definition of principle is
>A general scientific theorem or law that has numerous special applications across a wide field
while the general definition is
>A fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behavior
>or for a chain of reasoning
meaning that both theories of gravity, and Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation can be, if not are, universal principles. And, were I to try to do anything while alive, I'd always encounter gravity, causing it to become a universal principle as far as I could ever be concerned- a fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for the belief that I cannot fall into the sky.