[Serious] Moral Obligations toward Possible Worlds

[Angrboda]

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.

So, I've posted this before when the topic of moral naturalism has come up. IDK if it's relevant to the discourse here. Sorry if you guys are talking about something else.

(1) A property P is genuine if it figures ineliminably in a good explanation of observed
phenomena.
(2) Moral properties figure ineliminably in good explanations of observed phenomena.
Therefore
(3) Moral properties are genuine.

The ability of putative moral properties to feature in good explanations is one perennially attractive argument in favour of the metaphysical claims of realism. The initially attractive thought is that moral properties earn their ontological rights in the same way as the metaphysically unproblematic properties of the natural and social sciences, namely by figuring in good explanatory theories. So just as, for example, a physicist may explain why an oil droplet stays suspended in an electro-magnetic field by citing its charge, or a social scientist may explain high levels of mental illness by citing income inequality, a ‘moral scientist’ may explain the growth of political protest movements or social instability by citing injustice. Likewise, just as an observer of the physicist may explain why he believes that the oil droplet is charged by citing the charge itself, and an observer of the sociologist may explain why she believes that income inequality exists by citing the inequality itself, an observer of the ‘moral scientist’ may explain why they believe that a situation is unjust by citing the injustice itself. In such cases, it appears that the instantiation of a moral property – injustice – is causally relevant in producing an effect – a political protest movement or moral judgement.

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1930/1/T...prints.pdf

I'll have to consider this at more length, but a couple of problems occur to me at first blush. There are strong counter-examples to such propositions. First, free will makes for easy and understandable explanations. That fact doesn't appear immediately probative of whether free will is a reflection of reality. The same is true of folk psychology. The notion that the brain is an engine driven by energies and impulses acting on beliefs and memories is an attractive explanation, but in terms of truth, if something is true because it corresponds to something in the real world, there are obvious problems. I think the difficulty stems from three things. First, Munchhausen's Trilemma, which I just discussed. Second, the assessment of whether an explanation is good or not inevitably turns on coherence, whether the totality of beliefs form a consistent system. Unfortunately, consistency is a bit of a low bar. Things can be consistent without them being true. The fourth is the nature of ideas themselves. All ideas are representations. We don't experience the things themselves. My foot will never know what it is to be a brick, no matter how many times I kick the wall. So our conclusions ultimately must be inferred from experience rather than known through experience.

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No, I have not.  As I prefaced my very first post, I'm not arguing whether or not there are moral facts or that if such facts exist we cannot reason from them.  What I have argued is that there appears to be no way to inspect moral propositions other than intuition.  

-all evidence to the contrary in both cases - we're rationally inspecting moral propositions in this very thread - and none of the moral disagreements you reference imply or demonstrate that we have no way other than intuition to do so.  

That's not in the least bit true. I pointed to moral disagreements on slavery, homosexuality, pre-marital sex, and masturbation as questions as to whether a consensus of intuitions among the majority of thinkers was sufficient to determine whether something is likely to be true. And until someone shows some other basis for morals than intuition then skepticism that such exists is warranted. Reason and rational chains of thought have one thing uniting them that intuitions do not: they are transparent and accessible to inspection. If nobody has presented something possessing those qualities with respect to morals, skepticism is most certainly justified.

The problem is you mush separate things together in your brain like you did with intelligent design in a previous thread, resulting in you making indefensible statements. The technical fallacy is equivocation, which I suspect occurs because you lack the chops to keep ideas and meanings distinct from one another. In this thread I've made several arguments which touch on moral disagreement. Unfortunately for you, your fuzzy reasoning has zeroed in on the one argument that I haven't made.

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The apparent (and apparently severe) disagreement over abortion, for example, doesn't often arise out of any actual disagreement over the moral nature of the act of killing a child, or even the issue of whether we have responsibilities to them.  Even in thematically religious terms - it doesn't arise out of a body of literature that agrees with either side of the issue in this regard - despite the line being firmly planted in the general vicinity of religious demographics.  To use Vulcans example...anti-abortion sentiment seems to have a causal relationship with religiosity that it doesn't have with moral disagreement.

In a realists formulation, and trying to account for the idea that on balance moral objections to abortion are misplaced - it would seem as though the arguer apprehends a little less than half of the moral import of the situation - and..generously, a human being can be shown some other portion of a thing they didn't previously see and resolve whatever disagreement exists.  Ideally, when you go to explain the relevance of that other portion, you'll leverage something that they already believe about things like that.  This is why we so often ask about our responsibilities to the mother when told we have responsibilities to other people like unborn children.

I'd be interested in hearing what you think the facts underlying the abortion debate are. In addition to providing a good laugh, it could provide an example of Munchhausen's Trilemma applied.

I'll start the ball rolling by pointing out that abortion isn't killing a child in the same sense as killing someone already born is killing a child to pro-choice people. In their eyes, the term 'child' is equivocated upon to mean something it doesn't.