RE: Atheism and Ethics
June 7, 2024 at 2:46 pm
(This post was last modified: June 7, 2024 at 2:46 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(June 7, 2024 at 2:07 pm)Lucian Wrote: If I understand the rest of your argument correctly you are arguing that the difficulty in knowing something is not the same as that thing not being the case?
Sure, about sums it up, yeah. Tying it in with Angrboda's comments I think it's true that objective realisms difficulty is epistemological rather than metaethical- but I obviously believe that we can overcome that difficulty in at least some cases - why would I not include moral ones when those moral cases are identical to any other assertion of qualified fact? IE, when (not if...) moral facts are non-novel facts.
Quote:So for each example of a different way of approaching the issue there just is a cat of a certain colour - if people don’t believe that for whatever reason then that is a problem with them.It's possible. The list of things people didn't believe in because there was something wrong with them is vast and consequential. Though there's a more generous appraisal available to objective realists and objective realists alone. They are morally incorrect because they just don't know some pertinent fact about x. There's nothing wrong with them - they've just never seen a black cat. In my dystopian hellhole example there are probably alot of people who have - and so their revision is motivated by something else. Boots on faces do the trick, historically speaking. Discard these people, as they are not genuine relativists. They see the cat is black plain as day, just like me (us). That they say otherwise is not an issue of seeming or of objective reality. It's an issue of not getting skullfucked by the powers that be. Looking further in, there will be people who have never seen a black cat, and so, the Ministry of Truth's declaration that there is no such thing will not be...for them...in spite of an apparent fact. It may even be the only thing they know about black cats. We don't need duplicity or defect to explain their (hypothetical) counterfactual position that nyx is not black.
Quote:That is a useful analogy for how things would be if you are correct about moral values, but doesn’t seem (and might not be intended as ?) like an argument for the blackness of the cat itself, just that not knowing something doesn’t disprove it. Do you see a principled distinction between your acceptance of mind-independent moral values and claims of deistic gods?Sure. One is a field paper on the production of catawba grapes in semi-arid climates, and the other is a listicle about which cheese to pair with what wine.
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