[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that you're being hasty. Sure, things change, but the thing that's changed in this instance isn't whether or not people think slavery is bad - even slavers think slavery is bad. It's the distribution of people who hold to a view, and the extent of moral exclusions or justifications to the otherwise immoral (even by their own standards) in that view. Consider the views presented by confederate leadership and northern sympathizers alike. That slavery was a necessary evil. Necessary to the instruction of the black race, necessary to the function of society. There's moral agreement here, with anti slavery positions. The position qualifies evil.

Are you sure that there's no way to determine that other than intuition? Are you sure that moral disagreement is what you think it is, and means what you think it does? Using something other than intuition to determine that....? I suspect that you are using something more than intuition - even if you get it wrong. Quibble noted? It's not a workable objection imo, but if it were..then our quibble is grounds to apply it. There's no way for us to determine whether or not any one thing or another that we persistently disagree about is true or false other than intuition. If I say a tree is blue and you say it's green...the world may never know.

Our moral responsibilities with respect to some future generation may be true and obvious and rationally arrived at..and, even so, people will still disagree or fail to see as much or qualify whatever amount of evil we intend to do with justifying caveats. That, to me, suggests a far more elaborate process than the expression of intuitive thoughts. I think that we probably both hold a similar view bout human morality in practice - but I don't think that I could call it anything less than a rationalization. That's probably an effect of my having picked a lane, ofc. Between the notion that we can't get it right or wrong, and the notion that we can and we get it wrong alot - I think it's the latter. I absofuckinglutely believe that intuition is the culprit behind getting it wrong when and how we do a good amount of those times. Intuitions about personhood and shared humanity and economic necessity misinformed a great many people in the south, even as they saw the foundation of their own revulsion towards bondage as being as obvious as it has always been and still remains. They weren't wrong or even being irrational about morality, if we're being super accurate, they were wrong and irrational about other people - and that either facilitates or makes that specific moral failure inevitable.

I think the same thing happens with the abortion issue. Neither side of this is having a moral disagreement over babykilling or our responsibilities to our fellow man in present or in future. We may intuitively believe as much, though, and that intuition in spite of all very obvious evidence to the contrary will effect our consciously rational or rationalized conclusions in the same way. Garbage in, garbage out.