WOO for War!

Hello chaps, I hope you're doing well. I just thought I'd log in and tell you what I've been doing on the Philosophy scene. Peter Baron of the Philosophical Investigations website has asked me to do a few more cartoons for his next Revision guide. If you want to see my previous cartoons you can buy his recent AS Revision guide through his website, there's one here for you to see. Not quite as silly as the usual Being & Tim strips, but I'm working on it...

Here's one of the new cartoons that I've illustrated for Peter, a take on the infamous Boo-Hooray theory of the Logical Positivists. 




































The Boo-Hooray theory is related to Hume's idea that all the facts in the world cannot strictly speaking provide us with a moral imperative. But the Logical Positivists go further and say that expressions of morality are of not objective value, and instead are really only expressions of preference, saying 'war is wrong' is just the same as saying 'I don't like it' or 'boo to war'. When someone else says 'WOO FOR WAR then you've reached the end of the moral conversation. Which is what these two lay-dees have done...

Which gives me an idea for a Being & Tim comic.....!

see you later! becca x

Bricks & Sorrow

beep beep! Okay so it's a bit late today, and the image is a bit mussy, because I was rushing and didn't have time for the usual post-production routine!

According to my second year notes (!) the idea of bricks and sorrow being incommensurable is an example of non-cognitivism or emotivism. Moral statements can't really be said to be rational, because they're not statements of fact about the world but expressions of preference: in reality there is nothing by which we can compare them, just like there's no way to decide whether lasagne or chocolate is 'better'. Saying 'murder is bad' is like saying 'boo hiss to murder': saying 'courage is good' only says 'hooray for courage'. (Funnily enough, this is often referred to as the boo-hurrah theory!). The upshot is that we can't have a moral system, because there just isn't a way of systematising such statements. Instead we should just learn more about bricks I guess.

becca xo