[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Angrboda]

I just lost an edit to my previous post, but let me see if I can recreate it.

Several points:

1) The fact that people can commit errors of moral reasoning doesn't in any sense imply that there is a truth underneath the errors.  The errors could rest on a solid foundation or no foundation at all.  You need to talk about what's true, not what's false.

Moral failure and moral disagreement also fail to imply that we aren't reasoning.  That we're left adrift with only our intuition to guide us.

Since I'm not making this argument, this is just a strawman.

2) Nudger and I have discussed this before.  His suggestion was that unnecessary harm was immoral.  At which point I asked him to objectively define harm, and he substituted damage.  Unfortunately this doesn't work as there is damage that is not harm.  I damage my toenails by cutting them, and my hair likewise by cutting it, but there has never been any harm resulting.  The problem is that harm is a specific type of damage.  It's damage with something extra.  And I believe that something extra is personal preference or value.  Nobody cares that the lamb is eaten by the lion, so the damage to the lamb has no moral significance.  People do care if you eat them because they value staying alive, and that creates the concept of harm.  As I pointed out to Nudger last time, there are some people who would like to be dead, so killing them isn't harm.  

Here again I think that there are probably great objections to harm based moral systems, but whether cutting your toe nails is meaningful or relevant damage to moral systems probably isn't one of them.  I personally don't see the difference between necessary harm and harm - myself..it''s just something I like to include as it's a common notion.

I'd call doing bad for a good reason - doing bad.  

That's nice. Few parents are going to agree with you that getting their kids vaccinated is evil. You just seem to have some weird beliefs. The rest isn't an intelligible objection, so you'll have to try again, in English, if you want any such thoughts considered.

3)   I have a friend who is a consequentialist and would assert like Nudger has that harm is objective.  I also know people that agree with me that harm is a subjective measure.  These disagreements are common and are well known, so anybody that's telling you it's definitely objective is likely blowing smoke up your ass.  And even people who agree that harm is objective can't agree on some basics.  Consequentialists like my friend assert that the morality of an act depends only on the actual consequences, and intentions are irrelevant.  So, in his view, someone who accidentally kills someone has acted worse than someone who tries to kill someone but fails.  Others argue the reverse.  At the end of the day, one thing is clear.  People who are arguing the point are arguing a point of view, not some readily recognizable true fact.  And mere points of view won't feed the bulldog.

People who argue that 2 and 2 is 4 are also arguing a point of view.  One which isn't readily obvious to a great many small versions of ourselves.  Moral disagreement does not imply or prove moral subjectivity.  There will be moral disagreements regardless of whether there are or aren't any moral facts of any matter.  No matter how many examples of moral disagreement we care to dredge up, the objection will always be a formal logical fallacy.

It wasn't intended to argue that case. What it was intended to do was provide an inductive argument against believing in arguments for objective morals that are predicated upon subjective assessments as opposed to facts and logic which can be examined. You haven't offered any reason for believing that you possess a rational and objective foundation for ethics. That justifies my skepticism as to your actually having one. This isn't about whether morals are objective or not, a question that I'm happy to remain agnostic about. Again, you're attacking a strawman. What I am not agnostic about is any one person's subjective assessment of the matter being reliable in the absence of a demonstrably sound argument. I'm also skeptical as to the claim that we have other means to interrogate moral questions aside from intuition. I haven't really elaborated on that aspect. I'm too busy clearing away your nonsensical fluff.

Again, deliver some evidence of a rational foundation for morals or don't. I'm not gonna waste a lot of time debating what might be. Monkeys might fly out of my butt. I'm not gonna wait breathlessly for it to happen.

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If you want to peek at what I am arguing, consider Munchausen's Trilemma. Words or concepts can acquire their meaning in one of three ways. First, defined in terms of themselves, either directly, or indirectly, through a circular path. Second, a word can rest upon an infinite regression of sub-definitions, which rest upon more sub-definitions, ad infinitum. What's generally concluded is that both of these paths are vacuous. The words don't in any real sense end with a definition. The third leg of the trilemma is that definitions, concepts or whatever terminate in an indisputably basic fact. Basic facts are known through apprehension, or intuitively. You can't define what would constitute a basic fact, as that would lead to another iteration of the trilemma. So the challenge for those who would argue that morals have an objective foundation is to confront an equivalent trilemma for morals and show either that there is a fourth option that hasn't been acknowledged, or that there are basic, indisputable beliefs about morals that are objectively true. Failing to do either is just wasting my time.