don’t tell me imp believes the good is a universal property, instead of merely an adjective describing a positive or negative sentiment. That’s unhumean.
If you could just find one to fall in love with, be her suggar daddy, and have hot sex and 2.4 children with rat tails until the end of your days, would that not be good?
I wrote this in the absolute randomness thread. Here it’s a bit edited for context.
Some assume that our intuitions, and specifically ours and not theirs, are mechanisms which communicate with moral facts, specifically the goodness fact. That is to say, the idea is that out intuition communicates with the form of goodness in much the same way as our visual sense ‘communicates’ with the color of things.
But, different people seem to have different mutually exclusive moral intuitions about what is good. There is no agreement about this in the same way as there is about color. The moral realist answers to this through an analogy. You see, they say, centuries ago some people thought the earth was flat, and others that the earth was round. There was a disagreement, and in the end it turned out one side was wrong and the other right. In the same way, they say, some people’s intuitions yield false statements about moral matters, and other people’s intuitions yield true statements. Some people’s intuitions are faulty, and other’s, i.e., ours’, is in tune with goodness. This line of thought deals in physical facts, and must be supported by physical evidence. It must be shown in the people claimed to have healthy intuitions that their brains are somehow different people who’s intuitions are irregular, and this, as far as I know, hasn’t been demonstrated.
A more pressing issue the realist would have to deal with is why these objective values exists only for human affairs, and not apes’ for instance. It must be shown why the acts of one beast have no factual moral essence, while the acts of another beast, all but 3% genetically different than the first beast, do have an essence. What is it about the actions of man in particular that makes them either factually good, or factually bad?
Aside from this, it must also be shown where/when in the evolutionary development of man his actions acquired objective moral values, and why at that point, and not at another. Is this a matter of cognition, where any animal that becomes such and such intelligent graduates to a moral being? But then again, why? What evidence suggests this? The burden is on you, the believer.
But even before all this, the realist must show that acts of all things can have objective universal properties. In philosophy it is hard to allow the idea that objects have essences without a shitstorm arising, let alone that actions, series of events having been caused specifically by one creature, human, give rise to an essence. Such a notion seems absurd, and anthropocentrically ad hoc.
Keeping abduction in mind here for a second, consider this question: Is it more probable that with intuitions we only echo cultural bias for actions we’ve been taught to appreciate, and against actions we’ve been taught to dislike, OR that some select individuals for an unspecified reason actually sense through their intuitive mechanisms an objective moral essence for acts, and that this essence exists only for one particular animal (as it happens, the essence exists only for the animal which is asking these questions), and only these select few individuals have this capacity to actually reach the moral values, and all other’s intuitive mechanisms are faulty?
To justify such a belief one would have a grand challenge set before them.
Defining the terms is a great way to cut to the chase, so let’s try it.
“Objective”- Are we able to verify “objective truth” in the sense that it is a truth which exists independant of human interpretation? that it is universally true?
The way i see it we agree on Objectivity only through reassuring eachother that we are not mistaken.
Or we could say that objectivity is simply the absence of an agenda, bias, or corruption.
But objectivity doesn;t need to be brought into question, the two latter terms are more important IMO.
“Moral” is easy to define. a moral is a belief or code of conduct pertaining to better worse, right or wrong, actions. a moral is something to live by.
“fact” it’s a fact that the color blue is blue, but what about people who are color blind?
Is it not possible that we all percieve color in a different way?
We say the rose is red simply because we all recognize the specific color, that does not mean we recognize it in the same way.
Color is no more a fact of the universe than are our moral codes; they are our own interpretations.
a fact is really just an agreement. a proposition qualified through common ground and agreement.
We do not need to be conscious of our moral beliefs to demonstrate moraity.
Cappucin monkeys demonstrate, and therefore are assumed to understand the concept of fairness.
Afterall they have a consciousness do they not?
Two monkeys who fight eachother for dominance of a tribe demonstrate their differing views on how things should work and how we should live.
There are several ways to establish ideas… You can look at roses and define the colors, the direct way. You can develop a certain technnique for observing roses, and say that any product of that technique is “ideal”.
But so long as there ideas left unexplored or questions to ask any grandeose claim of absolute super duper eternal truth is doubtable.
If this is the way real philosophers argue, then consider me a pseudo-philosopher. This is bad on so many levels…I’d break it down for you, but you’re too old to learn new tricks, and these concepts are clear enough in my head that I wouldn’t get anything out of reiterating them. I really have no reason to say anything else. So I’ll just leave you with this and my last post, which sets up a fair challenge for the realist, though I think you didn’t even skim over, let alone understand and meet it.