Morality without God

[The Grand Nudger]

There's pretty much no end to potential 3's and 4's and no reason not to include them in consideration other than time constraints. In a natural and objective system, a larger collection of (sometimes conflicting) facts to make this consideration from is desirable even if there's no time in the moment to consider them all (hence deontology). In a natural and objective system, consideration of a broad range of facts may not lead to a good outcome (because we don't live in a vacuum) - merely the least shitty one.

An is can be a goal. Someone else's goal very much is an is-of-them. Our oughts are personally referenced. Because some other schmuck -is- trying to kill me, I ought to or need to or should come up with some response to that. If the schmuck was my tire, a solution presents itself. If I want to die, a solution is already at hand. I suppose that if a person wanted to die and that decision effected only them, there would be no moral import to the safe operation of driving a vehicle whatsoever. Fill your car up with accelerant, light the low pres tires on fire, and go jump school busses with it. No moral liability there. If, otoh, you're driving on a road or driving a bomb into a daycare - then there probably is a hell of alot of moral liability. Fill the tires up, or leave them flat, respectively.

Just as there's no single answer to why filling up our tires would be good, there may be more than one singular answer to whether or not it is good to fill up our tires. Assuming that there would be, or insisting that there must be (lest we have a problem with a system) is demanding that this non vacuum we live in provide us with something that it doesn't. Uniform and absolute circumstances to any given act or outcome - with at least one good possible course of action or outcome. In that sense, we're not actually registering a valid complaint about a specific system - but a standard gripe about the world and it's many cognitive difficulties, obstacles, and opportunities.

There has been a revival of an old discussion among ethicists (where some ideas are revised) that has breathed new life into Moore's non-naturalism. YouTube lecture. I'll post it here if I find it.

Moores non natural realism is well at home in natural realism.  The non natural in moores formulation is an explicitly novel use of the term. That was the weakness of the position in the first place. The famous example being that he thought that we may as human beings have an innate moral sense which does accurately pick things out in the world at least sometimes, that we could know some moral things a priori. Confronted with the possibility of a person who did not possess this ability, however, he implored them to go watch a group of adults beat an infant to death. Observation and experience. Insomuch as it' getting any new life, it's getting new life not for it's system, but for the manner of it's rejection of some moral questions as, essentially, dumb as a box of rocks and/or blind.

All that said, maybe we do possess such an ability, and maybe we can know some things a priori, and some moral things. Still, as before, seems like there's room for us to learn things beyond whatever innate ability we have, and pick out even more things of moral import than our intuition (which moore thought was completely natural, lol) might pick out. Providing even greater clarity and specificity than what would amount to "This is what my brain apprehends as bad when I see it, and I know it when I see it". It might also be useful to have some sort of system to determine when our moral intuitions as innate ability fail us. In that we're entertaining the possibility of that ability getting it right sometimes, it might also get it disastrously wrong for perfectly valid and self contained reasons.

Brings me round to the notion that different moral systems strengths and weaknesses are complimentary. I think that natural objectivism, for example, is most useful when you have alot of time on your hands and you're considering moral failure or exclusively suboptimal decision fields. I wouldn't try to sit down and Deep Thought my way through a present crisis of moral import. Or, put another way, the moment when your truck is careening off the road or into that daycare probably isn't the moment to ponder over any moral facts of the matter at hand from moments ago. You've got a new matter to deal with now, the trigger having already been pulled on that gun.

To Moore and to current analytic realists (now mostly scientific naturalists) - the idea that we can't prove good™ is as ludicrous for all of the same reasons as the contention that we couldn't prove gravity. Scientific naturalists take it a step further. Not only can we prove good, we can test it. Here, Moores formulation utterly fails - if only for the moment. The claim that humans possess an innate moral sense has become alot more testable than it was when moore (or anyone before him) presented it as a possibility. It (or something like it) may end up being true, and it's truth may come at the cost of it's objectivity or realism, in that case.