RE: Free will and the necessary evil
November 6, 2022 at 2:45 pm
(This post was last modified: November 6, 2022 at 2:52 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
The difficulty of generating sound propositions that stand the test of time and repeated observation as well as attempts to falsify them, I'd say, yeah. The same would seem to be true of contemporary moral philosophy - our musts as they relate to necessary evils, for example - being no more or less approachable by scientific tools than quantum gravity, at least in principle.
If we posit morality as an item of subjective circumstances then morality is biology.
If it's purely norm setting it's sociology.
If it's a matter of observation, then it would be physics.
(and I know our forum physicists would love to remind me that's it's all physics, down there at the bottom of the well,
)
Without getting into the weeds of which it is (or even asserting that it must be one or the other exclusively) it seems like we could use the tools at our disposal to make observations and form a hypothesis about each potential case and then see which best fits the evidence - which is a surprising amount of what contemporary moral philosophers do even if we learn about the subject as a matter of classical history. People may have once wondered about magical morality makers but, today, people wonder about our ability to predict moral response based on some rule or set of behaviors we can model, and describe through math. That may not, ultimately, settle the metaethical question, but it's sure as shit helping to settle the human questions.
If we posit morality as an item of subjective circumstances then morality is biology.
If it's purely norm setting it's sociology.
If it's a matter of observation, then it would be physics.
(and I know our forum physicists would love to remind me that's it's all physics, down there at the bottom of the well,
)Without getting into the weeds of which it is (or even asserting that it must be one or the other exclusively) it seems like we could use the tools at our disposal to make observations and form a hypothesis about each potential case and then see which best fits the evidence - which is a surprising amount of what contemporary moral philosophers do even if we learn about the subject as a matter of classical history. People may have once wondered about magical morality makers but, today, people wonder about our ability to predict moral response based on some rule or set of behaviors we can model, and describe through math. That may not, ultimately, settle the metaethical question, but it's sure as shit helping to settle the human questions.
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