RE: What would be the harm?
December 1, 2018 at 4:03 pm
(This post was last modified: December 1, 2018 at 4:12 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
You're still not engaging. Harm -is- bad, that's the proposition. You can create circular arguments all you like...but that's just you.
Harris' schtick is an intuitivist argument. Not "harm is bad because blah blah blah blah blah". Have I showed you the many ways in which harm is objective, yes. If you wish to maintain otherwise, the fact that you are not simply expressing what must necessarrily be your claim is for convenience sake, not that you aren't making one. You're tying yourself into knots, as noted at the outset.
I understand why, btw, and on a great many points I'm certain that I would agree with you when it comes to the difficulty of basing moral objectivity on harm. The difficulty, however, is not that harm is an insufficient basis or that harm is subjective.
The problem is that -we- are. That's exactly the problem that realism is proposed as a response to. We do not always see the harm, we see harm where there is none, and sometimes...sometimes...we just don't give a shit either way.
Harris' schtick is an intuitivist argument. Not "harm is bad because blah blah blah blah blah". Have I showed you the many ways in which harm is objective, yes. If you wish to maintain otherwise, the fact that you are not simply expressing what must necessarrily be your claim is for convenience sake, not that you aren't making one. You're tying yourself into knots, as noted at the outset.
I understand why, btw, and on a great many points I'm certain that I would agree with you when it comes to the difficulty of basing moral objectivity on harm. The difficulty, however, is not that harm is an insufficient basis or that harm is subjective.
The problem is that -we- are. That's exactly the problem that realism is proposed as a response to. We do not always see the harm, we see harm where there is none, and sometimes...sometimes...we just don't give a shit either way.
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