[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[Belacqua]

This simply pushes the question back: why should I care about human flourishing?

The only answer is because I care for my own interest - so just cut out the middle-man and ask what do I prefer.  Hence ethics is just my personal preference.  It just so happens that I prefer, generally, human flourishing for my own best interest (whether practical or emotional).

Ethics boils down to preference and then expediency (what best accomplishes my desires).  Anything else is pointless addition or rhetoric.

Well, sure. There is no way to prove, logically or empirically, that it's better to flourish than not. So in that sense it's a preference. 

You can't prove that it's better to be healthy. You can't prove that it's bad to chop the arms off of babies for fun. But there is some basic level at which we'd question the sanity of people who don't have that preference.

But yeah: ethics isn't a science and it isn't provable. So I could agree that it's a very serious discussion of what we do and should prefer.