Free will and the necessary evil

[arewethereyet]

Oh good - the smartest guy in the room meets the smartest guy in the room.

/sarcasm

[Ranjr]

The difficulty of generating sound propositions that stand the test of time and repeated observation as well as attempts to falsify them, I'd say, yeah.  The same would seem to be true of contemporary moral philosophy - our musts as they relate to necessary evils, for example - being no more or less approachable by scientific tools than quantum gravity, at least in principle.  

If we posit morality as an item of subjective circumstances then morality is biology.  
If it's purely norm setting it's sociology.  
If it's a matter of observation, then it would be physics.

(and I know our forum physicists would love to remind me that's it's all physics, down there at the bottom of the well, )

Without getting into the weeds of which it is (or even asserting that it must be one or the other exclusively) it seems like we could use the tools at our disposal to make observations and form a hypothesis about each potential case and then see which best fits the evidence - which is a surprising amount of what contemporary moral philosophers do even if we learn about the subject as a matter of classical history.  People may have once wondered about magical morality makers but, today, people wonder about our ability to predict moral response based on some rule or set of behaviors we can model, and describe through math.  That may not, ultimately, settle the metaethical question, but it's sure as shit helping to settle the human questions.

Yeah.  Which branch of philosophy will be the next to become science.  Will we learn to model behavior, sociology, and outcomes will enough to quantify and predict morality?  Is that something to shoot for or only dystopian sci fi.  That's the work of philosophy.

[LinuxGal]

All scholars agree that the findings of modern physics has had a significant impact on modern philosophy over the last century; the opposite is, however, not true.  Physicists do not care what philosophers think, except when they are trying to be polite about not caring.

That's a shame, because there are situations such as the quantum measurement problem that will never be solved by physics alone, but fall under the philosophy of the fundamentals of physics, and this historical animosity (which is rooted in university politics...physics and philosophy departments have turf battles over funding) has wasted decades.

[Jehanne]

All scholars agree that the findings of modern physics has had a significant impact on modern philosophy over the last century; the opposite is, however, not true.  Physicists do not care what philosophers think, except when they are trying to be polite about not caring.

That's a shame, because there are situations such as the quantum measurement problem that will never be solved by physics alone, but fall under the philosophy of the fundamentals of physics, and this historical animosity (which is rooted in university politics...physics and philosophy departments have turf battles over funding) has wasted decades.

"Never be solved" seems dogmatic.