Good and Evil

[bennyboy]

That situation differs from knowledge.  Knowledge cannot conflict with other knowledge.  If there is a conflict in two purported pieces of knowledge, one knows that at least one of them is wrong.  For example, if we look at the claim that Anne Boleyn cheated on Henry VIII and committed adultery, and compare that with the claim that Anne Boleyn was ever faithful to Henry VIII, we KNOW that one of those has to be wrong.  Conflicts in knowledge are impossible, as one of the conflicting claims must be false.

In the case of a physical action, either someone committed an action or did not commit it. In the case of an idea, it is not necessarily true that either an idea represents truth or it does not. And the reason for this is that the scope of a particular truth may be limited to a certain context.

Let me ask you-- is chocolate ice cream delicious? For the majority of American people, I think the answer would be yes. You could look to objective reasons why this might be the case: genetic predispositions for food with high fat and sugar content, for example. However, the ones who answer "no" are not missing any knowledge; they have knowledge of what it's like to taste chocolate ice cream in the context of THEIR genetics and physical apparatus.

I know chocolate ice cream is delicious. I've eaten it. Someone else knows that it is not delicious. They've eaten it, too. That we have different knowledge only means that the SCOPE of tha knowledge is limited: it does not transcend to all instances of human existence.

I think this is why morality pisses people off. I claim knowledge of a moral truth, and some other guy just calls my knowledge an opinion.

---

I feel like it's completely pointless to even attempt a discussion about morality if we concede that it has no basis in reason. All it will boil down to is "I feel this way," "I dislike that," and nothing could be more unproductive than a back and forth involving nothing but assertions that don't even carry the possibility of being assessed as correct or incorrect.

Of course morality has a basis in reason.  It represents a set of answers to a set of "should" questions: "How should I behave?" for example, or even "How should I think?"

But if I ask "How should I behave," there's always an implied goal there: "How should I behave if I want to be appreciated and loved by my community?"
 or "How should I behave if I dream of a peaceful, harmonious society?" or "How should I behave if I want to maximize the chances of others to live harmonious and fulfulling lives?" These questions, while solved or at least addressed by moral systems, are at their root emotionally motivated. And this is to be expected. After all, if you literally were incapable of giving a shit about anything, even pain and pleasure, then what would be the motivation for choosing a moral system or acting on it?