RE: “Normative” ethical theories
September 21, 2025 at 9:35 am
(This post was last modified: September 21, 2025 at 9:50 am by The Grand Nudger.)
I'm not sure it matters which of our positions is correct or whether you would succeed in talking me out of moral realism -or- warlording all over everyone's face, lol. From a utilitarian standpoint, the instrumental value of such an ethics seems nonexistent. One dissenter and we have no safe™ ground to argue towards our goal from? There are hundreds of millions of potential dissenters just here in the us.
Your solution is hoping that other people will join you. Why would they, though? What if I'm the most dangerous sort of warlord? Loyal and loved by his men. I'm going to split the spoils evenly between everyone who joins the cause. Now competitiveness and sociopathy is an instrumental good or potential instrumental good for all of your hoped for support, no? I'm going to increase all of their happiness and raise them all up out of the gutter to robber princes.
The question at the heart of all this being not whether you'd have to accept this as a practical matter, or whether you see no way to argue your cause in keeping with some set of stated ideological commitments, but whether you've selected these utilitiarian goods because you believe that even if a shock troop wanted it bad, and even if their shock troop leader and community said it was the way to go or it would in fact privilege that society over overs, it really wouldn't be good for them. That would be an example of smuggling in realist intuitions.
( I think every cognitivist metaethical basis can be logically grounded in a non contradictory way, and every descriptive basis can be established in an empirical way )
Your solution is hoping that other people will join you. Why would they, though? What if I'm the most dangerous sort of warlord? Loyal and loved by his men. I'm going to split the spoils evenly between everyone who joins the cause. Now competitiveness and sociopathy is an instrumental good or potential instrumental good for all of your hoped for support, no? I'm going to increase all of their happiness and raise them all up out of the gutter to robber princes.
The question at the heart of all this being not whether you'd have to accept this as a practical matter, or whether you see no way to argue your cause in keeping with some set of stated ideological commitments, but whether you've selected these utilitiarian goods because you believe that even if a shock troop wanted it bad, and even if their shock troop leader and community said it was the way to go or it would in fact privilege that society over overs, it really wouldn't be good for them. That would be an example of smuggling in realist intuitions.
( I think every cognitivist metaethical basis can be logically grounded in a non contradictory way, and every descriptive basis can be established in an empirical way )
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