Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[Angrboda]

Not a particularly good example, VL, as the facts can be reconciled with both the view that the sun circles the earth and that the earth circles the sun.  Thank you for the Enoch essay, I'll have to read it later.  You also recommended another essay on the topic, but I seem to have lost that reference.  Do you have it?

The essay was The Challenge of Cultural Relativism by James Rachels.

I thought my example worked because "objectivity" by it's very nature tends not to assume that any one apparent perspective is the correct one (that would be "subjectivity" right?). Although one may be able to account for differences in perception from different perspectives using an objective model, objectivity concerns itself with what is actually there regardless of perspective. If you assume the patch of earth you are standing on is "fixed" then the sun does appear to circle around you. But that doesn't mean that it actually does. Do not forget that Galileo proved the heliocentric model while standing upon a small patch of dirt in Italy.

Oddly enough, despite my evening's discussion supposedly intending to focus on devils, demons, and manifest evil, we actually took a detour into a short discussion of geocentrism. One participant claimed that the eclipses of... certain planets as well as Foucault's pendulum were incompatible with geocentrism. My point is that you can re-orient your frame of reference from a heliocentric one to a geocentric one without any loss of generality, as, with the possible exceptions noted above, there are no preferred frames of reference. So things work out just fine if you assume that the earth is fixed, aside from the proviso above, it just results in solar objects with rather strange and eccentric orbits. I don't know about Foucault's pendulum, but I suspect the eclipses would be the same regardless of which viewpoint you assume.

(Oh, and thank you for the reference. That was the essay I recall.)