Proving What We Already "Know"

[bennyboy]

Sure, people can get things wrong (but only cognitive things, lol..morality may not be truth apt at all..not subjective, not relative, not real).  As long as you're doubting truth, though, why not doubt that the earth is round?  If you think that's a fact and it would be ludicrous to object to it, then you understand people who say that there's something bad about beating a man in a coma, not as on opinion, but in fact... and it would be ludicrous to object to that.  

What have you been shown with regards to a round earth that you could not be shown with regard to the moral import of beating a comatose man?  I'd say that's the start of an answer to the question of how sure we should be about either thing.

In the context of my world view, as a living human being with a 20th/21st century life experience, the roundness of the Earth is so apparent that if it were not true, the entire world view would be in doubt.

If I were in a dream, and certain patterns emerged and were consistent across time, then I'd say that in the context of that dream, certain things were true that were not true in waking life.  For example, I've had dreams in which I could fly-- the truth of which was verified by the will to fly, the act of flight, and experiences that accorded with the truth of that ability.  Even upon waking up, I'd argue that it was true that I could fly in that particular dream.  That's a truth-in-context.

The problem is what happens when someone tries to generalize that-- "I've had many out of body experiences, vivid dreams of great portent, etc., so I am a special gift from God, and I need to surround myself with teenage girls who will help me breed an entire family-- nay, NATION-- of special gifts from God.  But don't doubt me and ask for evidence, because the Almighty is shy and gets stagefright."  Even if I accept that this guy can fly in his dreams, he's gonna have to do quite the tapdance to get me to believe anything beyond that.

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re: morality

Morality is a special case, as it's an attempt to reconcile subjective truths (e.g. a sense of value of various states of being, like liberty or safety) with objective UN-truths.  It requires deliberately holding a world view that does NOT represent a factual one, and then getting each other to act in such a way that the "real" world conforms more with the idealistic one.

For example, human males are pretty rapey.  But we all know and love at least some women, and we imagine a nicer world in which men do not rape women.  That world isn't real-- but through our social efforts, we approach it little by little.  It's not "true" in a worldly sense that women have a right not to be raped.  It's true in the context of a shared vision.

I've seen what happens when people try, for example, to generalize that to the animal world-- middle-aged women shrieking in horror when their little dog gets its butt licked by another dog, for example.  Or parents who beat children for transgressions against moral rules that they aren't sufficiently developed really to understand. Or people who love babies calling a 12-week embryo a baby, and crying over what is basically a tadpole, but will happily eat veal.