ChubbiestLamb6 t1_j9ke3vv wrote
Reply to comment by Judgethunder in Thought experiments claim to use our intuitive responses to generate philosophical insights. But these scenarios are deceptive. Moral intuitions depend heavily on context and the individual. by IAI_Admin
>optimal ethical determinations
Optimal how? The thing you seem to be missing is that you must choose a yardstick to assess any decision, action, situation, etc, as better or worse than another option. How can you possibly rank things as more or less optimal unless you've picked an attribute to care about? Your appeal to common values across cultures and species--even setting aside the inherent weakness of cherry-picking examples--hinges on a false equivalence between consensus and objectivity.
The fact that there is no objectively correct yardstick to use is the whole problem. It's not about, like, logistics, or the difficulty of accurately predicting outcomes in a complex system to be able to confidently pick the best actions, or anything like that. Those are all problems that come up after you've picked a yardstick.
I'm not saying your yardstick is a bad one, or an uncommon one. But you did pick it because you like it best for whatever reasons, compelling as they may be.
It seems like what you should be arguing for is something like an "Official Morality", not an objective one. I think failure to distinguish between the two is what leads to a lot of the friction in discussions like these. Reading your comment as an argument that it is possible to create a moral policy that is best suited to promote the things most people need and care about totally avoids the disagreements you're encountering. From everyone else's point of view, you missed the point of what "objective morality" means, and from your point of view, everyone else is bumbling around acting like it's impossible to determine if starving is preferable to being safe and well-fed due to some veil of philosophical technicality. But yhe real issue is that you're talking past each other.
Judgethunder t1_j9kh9b4 wrote
>From everyone else's point of view, you missed the point of what "objective morality" means, and from your point of view, everyone else is bumbling around acting like it's impossible to determine if starving is preferable to being safe and well-fed due to some veil of philosophical technicality. But the real issue is that you're talking past each other.
Yeah. That's about the sum of it.
ChubbiestLamb6 t1_j9l5mcs wrote
Soo...if you're aware of the problem, is there a reason you don't change your approach to the conversation?
Judgethunder t1_j9mdhdk wrote
Because I think it is indeed a useless philosophical technicality.
There are many objective facts we accept as objective facts because we use our senses to perceive then. Our senses are subjective. Nothing we detect using them is truly objective, from colors, to shapes, to anything at all.
But we set a standard of objectivity based on our senses anyway.
So in the absence of the word of a deity, what kind of objective reality could we possibly expect beside what we can to the best of our ability calculate is in the best interest of all humanity and the ecosystem we are a part of?
The fact that it is usually better to eat than to starve is as objective as me looking up and observing the color of the sky.
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