(March 21, 2026 at 7:46 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: How do you explain that some people will tell you the sum of 1 and 1 is 4? This is just academic, though. I don't think you or I would point to killing and eating other animals as our best behavior? It's a thing we do, yes, but not the best, or kindest, or most well considered thing we do.....right?
There will always be somebody who can't fire the bow without somehow hitting their own ear. No explanation will account for the terminally stupid or the criminally insane. What we can be reasonably certain is that if I take a bag that has one rock in it and drop another rock into it, then, barring breakage, the overwhelming majority of people will agree that there are two rocks in the bag. Aliens from other worlds that breathe ammonia and communicate via modulations of scent would be likely to arrive at the same conclusion.
By contrast, let's extract nine other people from all of human history and lock you in a room with them. The topic will be religion. Suitable weapons will be provided to all concerned parties. I doubt that you'd last a single day (honestly, a whole 24 hours is woefully optimistic) before you felt compelled to either lie about your beliefs in self-defense, maim somebody (probably several somebodies) in self-defense, or leave the experiment on account of an acute case of dead. We've had Thou Shalt Not Kill for about three millennia (probably more), and I doubt that in all of that time there has been a single year that we didn't commit mass murder of some form or other.
The rocks are a fact. There are two of them in the bag, and very few sentients would consider anything else. Facts describe the world as it is. By contrast, 'moral facts' describe what should/ought. They describe what is not, but we feel should be. That makes them dependent on what we feel at this moment, and that makes them not fact. We're a species of conflicting and compromised impulses that give rise to some interesting solutions in game theory. Describing that as 'moral fact' just mystifies the matter.
Quote:As in, two parties agree we should protect children, and violently disagree about what that protection looks like?
I thought that we had already discussed this with the various civilizations that felt no compunctions about sacrificing them to the flames, leaving them out on mountaintops, or drowning them in cenotes. Children have been used as cheap sources of expendable labour in our society less than 200 years ago. And then there are modern sweatshops. Where were your sneakers made?


