(March 11, 2015 at 1:58 pm)Esquilax Wrote: Here's the thing with all these "we should all just be selfish and act for our own self interest!" claims: they make a huge and confusing assumption, which is that in the hypothetical in which everyone just does what they want and discards the social contract entirely,All you have done is push the problem back the self-interest in preserving the tribe (often to the exclusion of other tribes). So the next step is to push it onto the overall survival of Mankind. Then, I suppose to all sentient species. At each level, the motivating principle is self-interest, although at the higher levels it is an ‘enlightened’ self-interest.
(March 11, 2015 at 1:58 pm)Esquilax Wrote: We have a real world that we share, full of predictable effects to causes, in which we share a uniform biological nature, within a set of well explained parameters. …that right there is a sufficient framework upon which to hang morality …How is it even possible for to group particular things into universal categories within the framework of naturalism (your version of reality)? The foundation of your moral system crumples if it isn’t grounded in a metaphysics that is compatible with things, like human beings and moral agents, having essential natures.