RE: Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?
October 12, 2018 at 7:55 am
(This post was last modified: October 12, 2018 at 7:59 am by The Grand Nudger.)
(October 12, 2018 at 7:48 am)robvalue Wrote: Well I don’t know. Are you saying rape is categorically right or wrong, or not? I’m saying it’s a malformed question, with any answer being meaningless. I’m saying that if absolute right and wrong exist, it would make no difference to anything.Yeah, sure. It's an easy one.
Quote:To "show" that rape is "wrong", you have to define "wrong" very specifically, and then the whole of morality hinges on that definition. Since people have never been able to agree on a precise definition, which one should we use? Why should we use any of them? You seem to very much be assuming that the wellbeing of humans is an essential part of what is right and wrong, and that you’d discount any other definition.
So long as the definition is accurate, what's the problem?
Quote:Of course, it’s no coincidence that people do on the whole value wellbeing, because that’s how we evolved. But that’s just modelling our behaviour, it’s not doing philosophy. If we're making cases about objectivity and facts, then "wrong" can’t simpky be to do with the preferences and comfort of a particular species on a particular planet. Who is to say what is right and wrong on a universal scale in general, and what would it even mean to try and define it?Well, it wouldn't really matter if we didn't evolve at all. Well being would still be one of the things we're discussing when we discuss morality. Imagine the insane..for a moment. Imagine that a god named jeff created us exactly as we are. We're still discussing well being when we use moral terminology. Obviously, if we cant even agree to that then nothing could productively follow between us, but that still won't say anything about the position itself.
Moral realism answers every level of discourse the same way because it's not the tip of the moral tree..some obscure branch of this or that. It's fundamental to what we're talking about when we discuss morality.
Are we talking about something objectively true of some act(s)? Do we purport to report facts...do we get those facts right? Can we?
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