Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Is your philosophical theory bad-ass?

Here's an interesting link that rates philosophical views on whether or not they are bad-ass or wussy. She uses it to endorse her own dietary restrictions against eating cute things, called acutetarian.

Can anyone think of other bad-ass or wussy views? Personally, I would put metaphysical idealism as a somewhat wussy view because often what motivates it are epistemic worries, e.g., a metaphysical reading of Kant's transcendental idealism. Though I guess I have to concede that when idealist bite the bullet and admit that their view can lead to solipsism then that makes them somewhat bad-ass, but it's a forced bad-assness.

3 comments:

  1. So everything you don't like is wussy? But what does this make zombies? Surely they have badass qualities but they are full of semantic tricks...

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  2. To Nikolai: Perhaps you could hold a compatibilist approach to the wussy-bas ass distinction; this would be counter-productive however because it would just find it self in the wussy agenda.

    A position like 'Moral relativism' has to be seen as wussy, right? Its a safe (stupid) idea to hold.On the otherahand 'Moral objectivism' should be recognized as a bad-ass idea. through one could argue that 'Moral relativism' has bad-ass qualities, but for the decent ones amongst us it just seems like a cop out.

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  3. To follow on from Will: Non-natural Moral Realism = totally bad-ass! Moore, not finding any natural properties that could be identified the good, threw caution to wind and introduced a new set of ontological entities!

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