The most important, basic, and fundamental questions in philosophy

I'm starting to read a new book this evening. It's called The Mystery of Existence: Why Is There Anything At All?, edited by John Leslie and Robrert Lawrence Kuhn. It's a collection of essays. I haven't gotten to even the first one yet (still reading the intro stuff), but it did make me think to write this blog post.

There are two questions or issues in philosophy that I think are the most fundamental issues in philosophy. The two most fundamental subjects, broadly speaking, are ontology (what there actually is and why) and epistemology (what we can know and how we can know it).

The most fundamental question in ontology is why anything at all exists. I suppose one might say a more fundamental question than that is whether anything at all exists, and I would agree if I thought that was actually a problem.

The most fundamental question or problem in epistemology is the problem of the criterion. Since the basic questions of epistemology are "What do we know?" and "How do we know it?," and since the problem of the criterion deals with these two questions, I think it is the most fundamental problem in epistemology. There's nothing more basic than that.

I think the most important subject, broadly speaking, in philosophy or any other field of interest is ethics and morality. How should we live? Or is there a "should" at all? Although I think it's the most important issue, I don't think it's the most fundamental since we have to address epistemology before we can even begin to look at ethics and morality.

If I were to design an intro to philosophy class, those are three main sections it would contain. I'd probably begin with epistemology since you need that to address any other subject. Then I'd go to ontology, then ethics. These things are related, though.

In my own intro to philosophy, I don't think we covered ontology at all. At least not as a subject all its own. I mean when we talked about dualism vs. idealism, that was ontology. But we talked about dualism more in the context of the mind/body problem, and we talked about idealism more in the context of epistemology (specifically in the context of the problem of the external world).

In my section on ontology, besides talking about whether anything at all exists, I would probably want to cover what I think are the three or four major worldviews--naturalism, idealism, dualism, and maybe pan-psychism.

And now I think I'll read some in this book, then go to sleep.

How to make outstanding fajitas

Fajitas are probably the number one most delicious thing in this whole world to me. Why, without your fajitas, the whole darn shooting match can go arse over tea kettle. Here is how I make them (mostly taken from these two videos but adapted for my own preferences):

Fajitas: I use this guy's marinade and sometimes his refrigerator drying technique.

Flour tortillas - I don't use the same ingredient proportions, but this is the best video I've seen on technique, though it's long.

1. Purchase your meat
1. Skirt steak, and/or. . .
2. Chicken breast
1. Put your chicken breast between a couple of pieces of plastic wrap
2. Beat it with a mallet or rolling pin or something to make it thinner and an even thickness throughout.
2. Get you a yellow onion and a red bell pepper.
3. Pico de gallo and avocado/guacomole is optional.
4. Don't get sour cream. That's gross.
5. Make your marinade
1. 1/2 cup olive oil
2. 1/4 cup lime juice
3. 1/4 cup soy sauce
4. 1 teaspoon salt
5. 1/2 teaspoon chile powder
6. 1/2 teaspoon ground cummin
6. Put the chicken and/or beef in a 1 gallon freezer bag with the marinade, and put that in the refrigerator for two hours (or however long you feel like).
7. Make the tortillas
1. Turn on your oven light.
2. Make the tortilla dough
1. Put some water in a small pot, and put that on the stove on a low setting (like 3 if you're using an electric stove). This is just to warm the water up a bit.
2. 200g flour
3. 3g salt
4. Just a pinch of baking powder. (More often than not, I don't put any baking powder in there at all; it's supposed to make the tortillas softer but the problem is that if you put too much, it makes them harder to roll out and get thin without snapping back.)
5. 33g of lard or butter (I prefer butter).
6. With your hands, work the lard/butter into the flour until the flour has the consistency of beach sand where it kind sorta kinda hold its shape when you squeeze some of it in your hand.
7. Pour in 112g of the warm water.
8. Mix it up with your hand, then use a bowl scraper to scrap it all out onto the counter.
9. Knead it for five minutes or until you get tired of kneading it.
10. Put it back in the bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it in the oven for 20 minutes or so. The light from the oven should make it the perfect warmth.
11. Cut the dough in half, cut those halves in half, and cut those half halves in half (you should have 8 pieces altogether [You could double all the ingredients if you're making these for your family]).
12. Tuck each piece under itself over and over so you kind of stretch the other side, then place the seam side down, and roll it around under your hand (There are YouTube videos showing how to do this. You're just trying to make balls.)
13. Dip the balls in flour, and put them on a plate. Cover it with plastic wrap, and put them back in the oven for another 20 minutes.
3. Cook the tortillas
1. Heat your cast iron skillet (or griddle if you have one) up to medium (like 5 on an electric stove).
2. Roll your dough balls out as thin as you can get them.
1. I cut a plastic grocery bag up, put that on a tortilla press, and put the dough balls between the plastic, and smash them to get started. The dough won't stick to the plastic bag. The tortilla press is unnecessary. You can just start rolling the ball out. I like to get it started with the tortilla press because it helps me keep them round.
2. Put some flour on your counter and put the dough on there, and start rolling it out with a rolling pin. There's a technique to it to make the tortillas perfectly round, and there are YouTube videos showing how.
3. Put the dough/tortilla in the skillet (there's a technique for this, too).
4. When it starts to bubble up, turn it over. Use a spatula to push it down when it keeps bubbling up. Once it's done, put it on a plate, a towel, a tortilla warmer, or whatever.
8. Cut the onion and bell pepper up.
9. Cook the meat
1. Take the beef/chicken out of the marinade and put them between paper towels to take off the excess liquid. One trick I've tried is to put them on a wire rack in the refrigerator for another two hours to let them dry a little before cooking. Having them somewhat dry makes it easy to form a nice crust when you cook them, but it's not necessary. You can just dried them off with a paper towel. If you use a grill, you don't have to dry them off at all.
2. Put your stove on medium high (like 7 on an electric stove), and heat your cast iron skillet up until it's smoking hot.
3. Put your meat in (if you're using the skirt steak, put the fattiest side down first).
4. Cook that for maybe 3 minutes on each side, then put it on a cutting board.
10. Cook the onions and bell peppers
1. Put your onions and bell peppers in the same skillet with the residue from the meat.
1. If you used chicken instead of beef, add a little oil. It's probably not necessary to add oil if you used beef with a little fat on it.
2. Cook that until the onions start to get soft, and put in a little salt and pepper.
11. Cut your meat against the grain into strips.
12. Now put your fajitas together and enjoy.

You're welcome.

Jehovah's Witnesses on the morality of blood transfusions

I argued in another post at another time that there's a difference between moral objectivism and moral absolutism. Moral absolutism is the view that moral principles are absolute in the sense they allow no exceptions. If something is wrong, then it's wrong at all times, in all places, for all people, under all circumstances, with no exceptions. Moral objectivism is the view that there are moral principles that are true independently of our preferences and beliefs, but one can be a moral objectivist and still believe there are exception to moral principles.

I was just thinking about how the question of whether there are exceptions to moral rules really depends on the granularity of the moral principles we're talking about. With the exception of a-moral choices (if there be any), you could state a moral rule for every single circumstance a person could possibly be in. But a moral rule book that contained all those statements would be impossibly long. Out of convenience, we speak of morality more generally than that. Instead of saying, "If you are in such and such situation, here's what you should do," we say, "You should be kind to people." Then we apply those more general principles to specific circumstances. We say that in general we should be kind to people, and since Bob is a person, we should be kind to Bob. Or we say since helping Bob move his furniture would be a kind gesture, we should help him move his furniture.

But there are degrees of generalization vs. specificity, which is what I mean by "granularity." If you had a really fine-grained moral rule book, then you might have one rule for each choice it's possible to make (e.g. when Jim drops his wallet this afternoon, you pick it up and give it to him). If you had a really course-grained moral rule book, you might just have two rules (e.g. Love God, and Love your fellow man). What occured to me as I was thinking about this was that the finer the granularity of your rule-book, the fewer exceptions we should expect their to be. If it were as fine as possible, then there wouldn't be any exceptions at all. At the same time, the more course the ganularity of your moral rule book, the more exceptions we should expect their to be.

As long as the Bible is, it's nowhere near as long as it would have to be for it to be a maximally fine-grained rule book. Instead, the Bible expresses moral principles in a general way. Some moral principles are more general than others. But that also means we have to allow for the possibility that some of the moral principles have exceptions.

Jesus explicitly taught this. While it is wrong to work on the Sabbath, for example, that rule can be overridden by a greater good--the good of saving life or healing. Just as it's right for you to rescue your mule even if it falls in a well on the Sabbath day, so also is it right for Jesus to heal on the Sabbath day.

There have to be exceptions to moral principles since there are such things as moral dilemmas. In general, it's wrong to lie, but if you're faced with lying to save somebody's life, or telling the truth and ending a life, you are probably justified in lying under those circumstances.

The Bible explicity forbids eating or drinking blood both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Jehovah's Witnesses interpret this prohibition as meaning that we shouldn't ingest blood in any way. So not only should we not take it into our bodies through our mouths, but we shouldn't take it into our bodies via tranfusion either. Personally, I think this is reading into the scripture something that isn't there at all, but let's suppose they are right, at least in a general sense. Let's suppose that at least in general it's wrong to take blood into your body through a needle inserted in your veins.

Nevertheless, this strikes me as being exactly the sort of thing Jesus was talking about. If a blood transfusion can save a life, then the value of the human life should trump the command to abstain from blood. The Jehovah's Witness refusal to allow for an exception to the general rule about blood drives them to what strikes me as being an immoral position--to allow people to die in order to observe the command to abstain from blood consumption. If we have an obligation to preserve life, then at the very least, this creates a moral dilemma since there are circumstances under which you can either preserve life or abstain from blood, but you can't do both. Which do you choose? If a Jehovah's Witnesses chooses to abstain from blood, are they not violating the principle to preserve life?

I haven't talked to a Jehovah's Witness or read their literature in a long time, but they used to answer arguments like these by saying there are alternatives to blood transfusions. So they attempt to avoid the moral dilemma by claiming you don't have to make that choice after all. I'm no medical professional, but from what I understand, they were just believing a myth. There is no artificial blood substitute that's just as good as blood. If there were, there wouldn't be all these desperate blood drives all the time. Blood transfusions are sometimes necessary to save life.

But let's suppose I'm wrong. Even so, this answer is evasive because the question remains: If blood tranfusion was necessary to save the life of your loved one (a child or parent), and you had to make the decision on their behalf since they've been in an accident and can't make the decision themselves, what should you do? In that case, you have to decide whether it's better to save a life by violating the prohibition against blood consumption, or to observe the prohibition against blood consumption by allowing somebody to die who you could've saved.

The irony in all of this is that the reason the Old Tesatment gives for why it's wrong to consume blood is because it's the blood that makes things alive. Blood has value because it symbolically represents life itself, and life is valuable. Well, if life is so valuable that we have to even respect that which gives life--blood--then it is the height of irony and madness to forfeit life in order not to consume blood. It's like being a general who surrenders his country in order to save his country's flag.