(March 14, 2017 at 12:44 am)bennyboy Wrote: That's fine, but there's the chance that due to lack of information, you are doing harm in the long run.There's the chance that a harmful thing may happen, but I don't know whether or not it makes sense to say that -you- did that thing, especially when we're discussing unforseeable consequences "in the long run". Maybe some timecops stop you from killing a baby, and a baby hitler. Does that man that they gassed the jews? If you feed them today, and they become dependent tomorrow, does that mean that -you- did that to them? I don't think so.
Personally, I can say without handwringing that killing a baby is a bad thing - even if that baby might grow up to a Real Bad Guy™, and that feeding starving people is a good thing, even if they turn into useless moochers.
Quote:Morality is one of those funny things-- we all think we have a sense of what it is, but when you examine it under a microscope, it starts getting a lot more squirrely. That's why I'm almost ignostic on objective morality-- I'm pretty sure that for any moral view or goal, we each have a maximally "right" behavior available. So if it's not genetic fitness, and is instead maintaining the most positive hedonic balance or whatever, it's still "out there" somewhere perhaps.Selective advantage to hedonism, lol? In any case... the whole point of objectivity is that those things aren't "squirrely". It would be like calling a pound of apples a "squirrely quantity of apples". If there are moral facts, our moral opinions either correlate to them, or they don't. Having a moral microscope would be fantastic, just as having a scale to weigh apples is fantastic. Perhaps our senses (or perhaps something else that we possess) are that microscope, and more than that...at least in some cases, sufficient? They provide us with moral opinions that correlate to moral facts. Maybe not all the time, maybe not compellingly, maybe bad things might happen someday in the future, maybe there are things we don't know...but the moral opinion that murder is bad correlates to a moral fact of the matter - even though we may have evolved the opinion for reasons unrelated to -why- it's bad by reference to the fact. What do you think?
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