(December 31, 2015 at 7:09 am)robvalue Wrote: Further thought:
Appeals to determinism are pointless in an argument. If your premise is that no choices are being made, then your own use of the word "should" becomes meaningless. So saying I "shouldn't call it morality" is itself a value judgement, and indicates I have some sort of choice in the matter.
So we either agree that "should" is a word with a meaning, or else there is nothing to discuss except hard science.
We use should all the time in determinism. The hurricane should hit the coast on Tuesday. It's just using our understanding and trying to predict an unknown outcome, even if the outcome itself is certain. The Hurricane doesn't have a choice, it only appears that way from our perspective.
So when I make my argument for why you shouldn't call it morality, I'm saying based on my understanding, this is the conclusion I think we should arrive at.
The other half of it is that the illusion of free will continues to exist whether we believe in it or not. The brain doesn't just say "You got me! Jig is up. I'll just shut down that part now." Because regardless of whether or not the end result is deterministic, we're still programmed to go through the process of getting there.
Re should as a value judgement, this goes back to the pragmatism vs. morality. I'm not assigning the value of good vs. evil or right vs. wrong, or any morality to it. I'm just implying the predicate "If we are attempting to assess this rationally, you shouldn't call it morality." I don't think being rational is right or wrong, or good or evil. It's just the context in which we're looking at things.
In fact, one of the cosmic jokes, is that after I tore down all my beliefs in search of "Truth", my truth turned out to include "Being rational not only doesn't matter, it was probably against my best interest, and I'd have been better off stopping at a slightly irrational truth."
