RE: Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?
October 1, 2018 at 6:42 pm
(This post was last modified: October 1, 2018 at 6:43 pm by bennyboy.)
Let me try for an objective morality.
I'd argue it by saying our objective reality, i.e. our DNA, takes precedence over our conscious reality.
Individually, we don't want to be harmed. We have, from birth, an aversion to harm and an attraction toward pleasure. Some of us have, to varying degrees, compassion for others, and it's by nature rather than by logic. But we don't arrive at these wants logically-- they are our birthright.
Then we're born, we interact with each other, we experience suffering due to lack of resources, or a pressure to mate, and so on.
It's important to understand that the goals of any moral system are intrinsically emotional-- dying is bad simply because we fear it. If everyone loved dying, nobody would care about murder. Rape is bad simply because it is very unpleasant. If girls deeply enjoyed getting raped, then we probably wouldn't need to stop it. The reality is more complex-- almost all men dislike not having a partner (or multiple partners) to mate with, but there are some men who for whatever reason almost all women dislike the idea of mating with. This leads to an emotional conflict-- do the men tie women to the bed and create a moral system which essentially institutionalizes rape, or do women (and sympathetic men, probably largely those who already like their mating chances) establish a moral system in which unwanted sexual advances will lead to an undesirable being removed from the community?
Emotions are highly complex and variable among individuals, but they aren't arbitrary-- they are the expression of a billion years of recorded interactions among our ancestors and their respective environments.
I'm not sure how useful all this is when we are tying to act with willful intent-- we are acting as though there is free will, and we are exercising that will in attempting to make a moral code, perhaps one which transcends the obvious practical shortcomings of the instincts which have thus far driven our moral systems.
Sam's version of all this, hedonic state, is impossibly complex and a bit naive. It would require good calculations, and foreknowledge. Who's to say that today's reduction of suffering won't lead to a tenfold suffering at some point in the future?
I'd argue it by saying our objective reality, i.e. our DNA, takes precedence over our conscious reality.
Individually, we don't want to be harmed. We have, from birth, an aversion to harm and an attraction toward pleasure. Some of us have, to varying degrees, compassion for others, and it's by nature rather than by logic. But we don't arrive at these wants logically-- they are our birthright.
Then we're born, we interact with each other, we experience suffering due to lack of resources, or a pressure to mate, and so on.
It's important to understand that the goals of any moral system are intrinsically emotional-- dying is bad simply because we fear it. If everyone loved dying, nobody would care about murder. Rape is bad simply because it is very unpleasant. If girls deeply enjoyed getting raped, then we probably wouldn't need to stop it. The reality is more complex-- almost all men dislike not having a partner (or multiple partners) to mate with, but there are some men who for whatever reason almost all women dislike the idea of mating with. This leads to an emotional conflict-- do the men tie women to the bed and create a moral system which essentially institutionalizes rape, or do women (and sympathetic men, probably largely those who already like their mating chances) establish a moral system in which unwanted sexual advances will lead to an undesirable being removed from the community?
Emotions are highly complex and variable among individuals, but they aren't arbitrary-- they are the expression of a billion years of recorded interactions among our ancestors and their respective environments.
I'm not sure how useful all this is when we are tying to act with willful intent-- we are acting as though there is free will, and we are exercising that will in attempting to make a moral code, perhaps one which transcends the obvious practical shortcomings of the instincts which have thus far driven our moral systems.
Sam's version of all this, hedonic state, is impossibly complex and a bit naive. It would require good calculations, and foreknowledge. Who's to say that today's reduction of suffering won't lead to a tenfold suffering at some point in the future?
