RE: What would be the harm?
December 7, 2018 at 12:37 am
(This post was last modified: December 7, 2018 at 12:39 am by bennyboy.)
(December 6, 2018 at 9:40 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: OFC, why would their individual inabilities change the moral appraisal of the act? It only changes how we view their culpability for it. In much the same way as harm still being bad, but a lion not being held morally accountable for doing harm....and just to draw that one even closer into the realm of applied justifications, the harm the lion causes and our inability to sit it down and have a little chat being the impetus to kill the lion.(I'll come back and answer some of your post later. Let me say that the posts are a little too long. Can we agree to something like not more than 10 lines of quoted text, and not more than 10 of fresh ideas?)
I have one question for you: How do you distinguish between the following cases:
1) There's an objective moral truth, and not more than one person in an argument is getting it right.
2) There's no objective moral truth, and two or more people have different ideas about how to think, act or feel about something.
You are probably familiar with my approach to truth: Truth-in-context. Take, for example, abortion. GIVEN the sanctity of all human life, then abortion is wrong-- a human zygote is still human, and killing it represents harm to it. GIVEN that the sanctity of life depends on experience, and that a zygote cannot experience, and GIVEN the sanctity of a woman's right to self-determination, then abortion is pretty much fine.
My view of morality is that people will feel about things, will decide how they want things to be, and will go through a process of social negotiation, i.e. they'll cast their moral vote-- no objective truth required. But how would you establish one or the other to be correct? I don't think there IS a right answer to be found, even hypothetically, to questions like this.