Is it a good thing to give up or is it a bad thing? If one is good and the other bad, then one leads you further on the path to virtue while the other leads you closer to vice when repeated.

Habit is not the only way to steel oneself against emotions that get in the way of virtue. If one comes to understand these emotions rationally, then the brain has a way of increasing the reasonableness of the emotions. And a good way to lessen unreasonable emotions is to play with them: to study them carefully while having them, which is ultimately just understanding oneself. This is a bad approach with chemical addictions, because the feelings created by chemical addictions are not you, but it is useful with anti-addictions. Every emotion has a purpose, and when the purpose is better understood, its presence becomes more what one would expect.

I think people underestimate the importance of establishing good eating habits. For example, sometimes I can play computer games more than I should like. I would prefer, for example, to study math. But it seems like when I feel like playing computer games too much or otherwise behave in seemingly unreasonable ways, usually that is associated with a period of careless eating. Why just the other day without thinking about it I chowed down three or four bananas (I didn’t even keep track) and got all excited about my having discovered a new math joke, and posted it in a place that doesn’t allow edits without even realizing I had confused the square of the square root with the square root of the square. It was mortifying. But eating is rather different from typical addictions. One must eat. And so it behooves one to not forget what one eats, whereas one can just forget drunkenness, etc. And people have a tendency to eat when nervous. So whereas nervousness and fear can keep one away from abuse, it won’t keep one away from an eating addiction. I think that is why eating rashly is associated with anti-addictions. Certain bacteria in the gut have probably evolved so as to make people feel nervous and compulsive because that tends to cause eating. When people feel nervous and excited, they eat, because emotionally they feel as though maybe some thing has a hold of them, in which case it will likely monopolize the food bowl. And when people feel nervous and compulsive, they feel like playing computer games more than usual.

I used to feel sort of like you. At one point, I went about five years without playing a game or looking at sports. But looking back, I think I was too severe with myself there.

Much of fear of addiction in men comes from females manipulating males into thinking that the sexual pleasures males experience are unreasonable. Males tend to be pleased by sex from numerous females, and females are forever trying to make males think that males are succumbing to an addiction when they explore their own sexual desires and more particularly pleasures, lest they realize they want sex with lots of females. Not that females care much how many females a male has had (meaningful) sex with, but a bad one usually wants to have an explanation handy for why any male who wants to have sex with her is a beast if he doesn’t want to care for her and their offspring, since having this explanation handy might trick males into caring and marriage. The habit of avoiding sexual fantasy and the pleasures thereof is a very bad habit for people to try to form, such a bad and common habit (also common is the waste of energy and time expended by males trying futilely to gain this habit) that it rather sours me toward the whole emphasis on habit as a particularly important virtue. If males weren’t so ridiculously afraid of being addicted to their own sexual pleasure, maybe they wouldn’t be so afraid of listening to their own natural sexual tendencies, and then they’d realize just how complex and beautiful these tendencies can be (except, of course, for the few who have naturally simple or ugly sexual tendencies), which is the first step toward gaining an understanding of them that would cause true refinement of their sexual behavior.

Morality is subjective, meaning it works for one person but maybe not another. Different honor codes are also the same as morality. IT’s right in their culture, wrong in another.

Ethics is not subjective and does not want to be.

That is the basic difference. So, even if the modern dictionaries, not designed to speak of philosophy and debate its fine points, say that morality and ethics are both contained in one Greek word, it doesn’t really matter.

Aristotle is my favorite ancient philosopher, but his contention that none of the virtues of character arise naturally and his emphasis on habit seem overblown.

People get addicted cause they have gotten into the habit of raising their tolerance and being physiologically dependent on the substance to feel normal.

That is habit, not some kind of ephemeral use of will power.

You don’t need will power when you are in the habit of doing things a certain way. You just do it. You don’t need will power because there’s nothing inside of you resisting it. As for external factors resisting you, you just grind them down through repetition.

when fighting cave monsters in a computer game, one can get too obsessed, because emotionally giving up might make one feel as though one has given up because some nefarious addiction (from the monsters) has made one feel like giving up.

That’s not a very good argument against Aristotle’s Virtue Theory in terms of the importance placed on habit.

The rewards of pleasure and pain modify people’s behaviors, but they don’t decide them. When a person responds to pleasure and pain in repetitious fashions, then a habit forms. And whether that habit is good or bad for you, depends on what the action you are repeating provides in terms of real life consequences.

Is it a good thing to give up or is it a bad thing? If one is good and the other bad, then one leads you further on the path to virtue while the other leads you closer to vice when repeated.

because one understands the incontinent emotions are only appropriate

There’s nothing fundamentally moral or immoral about having emotions. Which, I assume, is what you mean by “incontinent” since you mentioned morality was continent.

but just because one can live more lazily and with less strain if one can do everyday things by habit, as routine encourages.

You forget that to create and acquire habits, require effort. They require far more effort, patience, and time than the momentary will power it takes to resist temptations and addictions for a moment in time. Habits are for almost forever. But there’s no certainty that if you make a great effort now, right here, that you will get into the habit of dong so next time.

Virtue deals with future consequences and the future well being of both the person and the people they affect. That is why habits are so important to virtue and vice.

Aristotle is my favorite ancient philosopher, but his contention that none of the virtues of character arise naturally and his emphasis on habit seem overblown. Continence [enkrates] is mainly important when dealing with addictions. On the one hand, one needs to use willpower when confronted with addictions like drugs or depravity. When eating food a kind of thoughtful continent sacredness is very helpful by way of avoiding excess. Also, a contrary kind of continence is appropriate when one is confronted with something that makes one feel like quitting would be an addiction. E.g., when fighting cave monsters in a computer game, one can get too obsessed, because emotionally giving up might make one feel as though one has given up because some nefarious addiction (from the monsters) has made one feel like giving up. It is better, e.g. in fighting wars, to be calm because one understands the incontinent emotions are only appropriate when one is getting molested (forcibly sodomized) than because one believes these insane-like berserk or numb emotions have no appropriateness. Sometimes people really do get molested. Unlike with addictions, incontinent feelings arising from anti-addictions are imho worth playing with in moderation though, since doing so teaches oneself something. As for habits, a habitual routine can be useful, but not so much because it strengthens will power, but just because one can live more lazily and with less strain if one can do everyday things by habit, as routine encourages.

Not really. This is just the general framework you pick up from philosophy or any philosopher, at least any philosopher from Ancient Greece. The most notable philosopher, and the one I believe got the most things right, would be Aristotle.

Aristotle tends to associate virtue with love of beauty or fineness [kalos], i.e., with doing something “for the sake of the fine”

” Now the brave person is is unperturbed, as far as a human being can be. Hence, though he will fear even the sorts of things that are not irresistible, he will stand firm against them, in the right way, as prescribed by reason, for the sake of what is fine, since this is the end aimed at by virtue.”

It is very useful, I think, to view goodness (=morality) as love of the beautiful. The thing is, that it is also very useful to think of the beautiful as partly goodness. Care must be applied to avoid illegitimate circularity. It seems to me Aristotle basically is attempting to deal with this difficulty when he introduces the concept of special justice (EN 1130b). Once you’ve defined virtue, you can define justice basically as behaving as though one loves virtue, but being just is itself a virtue, so the definition of justice involves virtue and the definition of virtue involves justice. Aristotle is forced to first define “general justice”, which basically is just the justice corresponding to (justly) loving typical virtues, and then define a new justice, special justice, which is the justice corresponding to (justly) loving (general? special and general?) justice, i.e., to not being greedy.

I think what is necessary is to divide the beautiful into various disjoint components. The zero component contains the concrete virtues that do not involve love, justice, etc.; it is mostly talent, what is useful directly for survival. The n + 1 component corresponds to love of the n-component. So 1-beauty is love of 0-beauty, 2-beauty is love of 1-beauty, etc. The advantage of being a good person, and why goodness has evolved to various degrees, is that it tends to cause you to be loved by those who share your ideals. It follows that what a good person loves, i.e., what he finds beautiful, is likely to be about the same as what he loves others to love. Mathematically (thinking of the beautiful as forming a probability space), this suggests that the fraction of beauty that is n-beauty should be the same as the fraction of goodness that is love of n-beauty, i.e., that is n + 1-beauty. (Another way of thinking of this is that what is beautiful is part goodness, and the rest a concrete part that is not love of something.) This implies that the various components of beauty are geometrically distributed with ratio equal to the fraction of beauty that is love of something, i.e., that is not 0-beauty. I’m a little skeptical about this geometric weighting, though, since I seem to have gotten something without even defining what it means for some type of beauty to be a certain fraction of beauty as a whole. And what I think I mean by love is effective love, i.e., love that has the faculties behind it to work, and my argument for a geometric weighting sounds moderately less convincing when I think of love that way.

One could define things very broadly with reference to the distant future. E.g., if a peacock loves fancy tail feathers in a broad general sense, he also will in practice behave as though he loves love of fancy tail feathers, because love of fancy tail feathers is something that peacocks need to have in order for fancy tail feathers to evolve. If peacocks behave as though their end is to make peacocks more full of fancy tail feathers in the very distant future, they will behave toward one another in a fairly moral (in my sense) and just way. But a peacock dividing beauty up into parts and weighting the parts geometrically tends to make it so what the peacock finds beautiful in a mate is more similar to what the definition of beauty directly suggests, and makes peacocks’ imagining the distant future much less necessary or dependent on the particular time in the future imagined. So even in peacocks I imagine a sort of geometric sequence appearing in their definition of beauty or whatever part of their brain causes their preferences. The difference I’m guessing is that 0-beauty for a peacock is mostly fancy tail feathers, while for humans (more capable of reasoning with abstractions) it is more like talent. There is an advantage to oneself in taking 0-beauty to be something that is useful to have in a mate. I think a broad interpretation of beauty is appropriate even if one breaks beauty up into components as I suggest. It is useful to think of good behavior as that which makes the world (or universe) a more beautiful (or finer) place (in the distant future).

Ethics is not relative like morality. Morality says “tribalism is right in Iraq cause everyone does it and is corrupt” and our morality says “corruption sucks and hurts everyone cause’s that how it works here”. Ethics applies, equally, to all civilizations, societies, nations, and cultures. what is bad and ungood for you in one society, is bad for you in any other, given Ethics. Bad ethics means it has exceptions and thus, is falsifiable.

Robert E. Lee fought for the South and slavery even when he detested slavery.

This is a set of honor that priorities loyalty to one’s state and home over nagging inconsistencies like slavery.

Ethics decide which priorities should be supreme over other priorities.

The morality of the South said Lee had to resign from the US Army and fight for his home. But that’s not the decision Lee would have wanted to make if he had free will. So, in a sense, Lee did not make an ethical decision. He made a moral one and an honorable one, for honor isn’t necessarily ethical all the time. And I’m not talking about “honor killings”, either, cause those guys don’t even have honor to begin with.

because the soldier is immoral

Fighting for your own nation and family isn’t immoral. That is what you were brought up to do. When you say a person fighting for his nation and family is “immoral”, you had better have a system of morality that makes it so and ONE that he follows. Cause otherwise, you’re talking about ethics, not morality.

You brought up some interesting points, which I shall probably discuss after having considered them for a while.

Take your time.

here’s some help on what I mean by moral, immoral, and amoral.

Amoral is the guy that doesn’t care about society’s laws, takes out a gun, shoots you six times, checks to make sure you are right, all because you bumped into him and then punched him once.

Like this video, Link

Moral is doing what your society says is right, what you were brought up to believe was right, and what your loved ones believe is right. Like say, your brother is wanted and on the run and he asks you for help. Your family expects you to help him. Society expects you to help your family, but society also expects you to obey its laws, which includes harboring fugitives. Which morality do you choose to follow? Either way, you will become IMMORAL, in the morals of one or the other. That’s called a moral dilemma. Different from an ethical dilemma, which says you should obey the law cause it is ethical, not moral. And that means turning your brother in, even though he is blood.

Immoral is doing what you know is wrong, by law, society, or family. Killing your father and stealing his crown, that’s called immoral. That is not, technically, evil or unethical, cause your father may have been Hitler and you needed to stop him, permanently.

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That’s already happened. MOre than half of what you think is right is because the people you love and your family have taught you is right. It is not something you just came up with yourself.

Is murder right? Is rape right? Is child molestation right? Is any number of other things, that could be learned from any other culture, “right”? If not, you just had your morality informed by greater society, whether you realize it or not.

Let’s not fool ourselves into actually thinking we had any choice as to what set of morals we were raised with. Or that we didn’t adopt a whole shat load of them consciously and sub-consciously.

Like say, the resistance towards doing violence. That’s an American societally conditioned response, because sheep ain’t supposed to fight, they are supposed to work, be peaceful, and pay their taxes in wool.

Many people break out of their conditions, for one reason or another, and throw off the morals they have learned, in order to adopt ethical systems of right and wrong that they have decided is superior or what not.

There is an underlying ideal definition to morality just as there are underlying ideal definitions to mathematical concepts.

Given that you don’t live in an ideal society, you can’t have ideal morality. Not even close.

And trying to determine for oneself what the fundamental laws are and what they imply is not called narcissism

it’s not called morality either, it’s called ethics. It is only narcissism when you think you make your own “morals” by some kind of personal solipsistic choice.

Morality advances when moral people advance.

Sort of like if more people in a society do the right things, the morality of that society will improve. Which is the same thing I already told you.

If you wish to seek out beauty, then you would do better to read up on Aristotle. The problem with free will