Devil's advocate for why ontology is meaningless and vacuous.

[Gemini]

This all fascinates me.

Again, the ontological aspect is meaningless.

This would be a weak form of 'knowing' the ontologically objective subjectivity of another. So hmmm... ontology is meaningful to one extent: To distinguish between it and epistemology.

People's subjectivity objectively exists. Without distinguishing between ontological and epistemological objectivity a statement like that can confuse people.

Morality can be objective if defined in a certain way so as to consider disregarding the empathy of others to be bad.

A few years ago I read a paper by a philosopher who argued that philosophy doesn't make progress. He argued that intractable philosophical disagreements are the result of people conceptualizing things in different ways, which results in philosophers talking past one another on the key issues that cause their disagreements.

I think he's wrong on philosophy not making progress (we shouldn't expect all philosophical disciplines to progress at the same rate, and we've only been doing this for a few thousand years), but I think he's right on the latter point. Which means that when two philosophers use words like "universals" or "free will" or "morality," the targets of their terms may be irreconcilably different concepts.

So it's absolutely true that morality can only be objective if it's defined a certain way. And nothing compels us to define it that way. We could define "morality" in terms of obeying commands or rules, and then it would be impossible to find an objective basis for it. Just as if we defined or conceptualized "bachelor" differently, then there might be a possible world in which there were married bachelors. The question is which definition/concept of morality is the most useful.

The way I see it is... objective morality is not the same as universal morality. Sure there will always be idiots who are like "I think not giving a shit about people is just as moral" but we can discard them like we discard the idiots who think fossils were placed there by Satan. "You can't prove that empathy and compassion has anything to do with morality" makes as little sense to me as "You can't prove that dogs and cats have anything to do with pets."

I think part of the problem is that when we first learn about "right and wrong" as children, our capacity for empathy isn't fully developed. When we're children, we can't rely on empathy to moderate our behavior, for the same reason that sociopaths can't. We're missing some vital hardware (and many psychologists argue that kids can't be diagnosed as sociopaths, because normal kids share too many symptoms with sociopaths).

So we start out conceptualizing morality in terms of commands issued by authorities. But trying to define morality qua morality in the way that children understand it strikes me as being the same kind of mistake epistemologists make when they try to define epistemic justification in a way that grants children epistemic rationality (some do!). Which leads to "properly basic beliefs" and that general class of bullshit.

I mean, come one. Children believe in Santa Clause. And (in reasonable courts of law) they can't be tried as adults either, which makes them neither rational nor moral.

Which is an important pragmatic consequence of this philosophical issue. We've got to teach kids what real morality and rationality are. And as a society, we're not making much of an effort right now.