Veganism

[Paleophyte]

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.

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?

[Thumpalumpacus]

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.

This point is crucial to the discussion here.

[Paleophyte]

No, I'm not. Please stop making things up and saying that I'm saying them. Those strawmen have got no brains.

You did say that moral agreement is just what's fashionable, for instance.

No, I didn't. I'm denying its existence. I said that a long time back when I first said that there was no evidence for 'moral facts'.

I can't be bothered going and digging up all the quotes of you saying the things I said that you said. I'm not strawmanning you. But you *are* begging the question a lot.

You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

I can't beg a question by saying that you've provided no evidence.

I'm saying that there's no agreement. Historically, spatially, and culturally, people have believed that wildly different things were moral. Just like the drunken archer, whose scatter of arrows are not in agreement.

Obviously sometimes people agree on morality. So there is some agreement. You're just discounting it and saying "That doesn't count." What is the actual argument for any apparent agreement not being real agreement? Why is it just what's fashionable?

In classical rhetoric and logic, begging the question or assuming the conclusion (Latin: petītiō principiī) is an informal fallacy that occurs when an argument's premises assume the truth of the conclusion.

If it's so obvious, then I'm certain that you'll have no difficulty providing evidence rather than yet more argument. Kindly try to correct for the fact that the overwhelming majority of moral systems were imposed at gunpoint by a relatively small portion of Western Europe. The only thing that's obvious to me is that we don't follow our own relatively flexible moral precepts.

[Fake Messiah]

This just begs the question.

So I'm begging the question by pointing out that you don't have evidence for your claim which you are trying to hide with bad analogies. Go figure.

I can point to someone being tortured.

Yeah, like me reading your replies in which you are proven wrong but still insist that you are somehow right. Don't you know that torture is immoral?

It can be argued that we do see that. Women's rights, gay rights, the abolition of slavery.

We don't see that because in many countries women's rights and gay rights are not a thing, and even in countries where they do exist, there are many prominent people that want to overthrow them.

So in order for you to say they are objectively good (or "morally realistic") you have to answer why are people against them? But you won't.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Gravity is a fact. The act of killing a person being moral or immoral is not a fact. When you walk off'n a cliff, you will fall down and hit the ground. When you kill someone, you may have committed a crime, or you may have defended yourself.

[Fake Messiah]

Morals in Western societies come from what people agree to through discussions, human experience, and politicians they choose. By doing that, people are not discovering some universal truths (morals), but what works in some place at a certain timeline with the least amount of damage to everyone. That is a democratic and humanistic way.

But when you have these ideas of moral universalism and/or moral realism, what you really have is a group of people claiming that they know what is moral with all the baggage that comes with it. So, moral universalism and/or moral realism pretty much looks like just another way of trying to shoehorn authoritarianism.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Moral apprehension is a matter of individual thought. Assigning it to some god or some objective outlier is, to me, the abdication of the moral authority of the individual in question.

If you do something because someone tells you it's Right®, or avoid doing something because someone tells you it's wrong, you're resigning the requirement to think for yourself. At that point you're not a moral agent, you're an amoral accessory. So if morality is objective and you do something because it's "objectively" right, are you being moral at all? Or are you goosestepping your way through the day?

I think the idea of an objective morality is a convenient way to offshore thinking.

[Paleophyte]

To me, it just needlessly mystifies the entire process. Like many, many fields, we've been able to figure out the underlying physical basis for morality courtesy of evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, neurology, game theory, etc. If we know that there's an optimal strategy of not having a society of murderous, rapey thieves, then why do we need 'moral facts' that only seem to cloud the issue?

My other issue is that there seems to be very little evidence for an external moral authority of any sort, even once you dispose of the claptrap that religion burdened us with. To me it's a notion that's neither useful nor demonstrated, much like the luminiferous aether.

[Disagreeable]

So there is agreement, then. So it makes no sense for anybody to keep pretending like there is only disagreement and no agreement. And if the agreement somehow doesn't count: why not?

Because ad populum argumentation, on either side, is fallacious. subjective.

If it's fallacious on either side then saying that there is no objective morality because of disagreement is just as problematic as saying that there is objective morality because of agreement.

No, I didn't. I'm denying its existence. I said that a long time back when I first said that there was no evidence for 'moral facts'.

Do I have to quote you saying that agreement is just what's fashionable?

If it's so obvious, then I'm certain that you'll have no difficulty providing evidence rather than yet more argument. Kindly try to correct for the fact that the overwhelming majority of moral systems were imposed at gunpoint by a relatively small portion of Western Europe. The only thing that's obvious to me is that we don't follow our own relatively flexible moral precepts.

It's obvious that there is moral agreement because sometimes people agree on morals. Like I said: most people agree that rape is wrong. The question is WHY do you discount that?

With regards to the point about begging the question: When I ask you why you think that there is no moral agreement you effectively just say because there is no moral agreement. That is begging the question. You don't give an independent argument. I keep asking WHY you think that there is no agreement, and you aren't giving a substantive answer.

[Disagreeable]

This just begs the question.

So I'm begging the question by pointing out that you don't have evidence for your claim which you are trying to hide with bad analogies. Go figure.

You're begging the question when you say that morality has no target. According to moral realism there is a moral target. So you're begging the question.

Yeah, like me reading your replies in which you are proven wrong but still insist that you are somehow right. Don't you know that torture is immoral?

Exactly. Torture is actually immoral. So that's one example of a moral fact.

We don't see that because in many countries women's rights and gay rights are not a thing, and even in countries where they do exist, there are many prominent people that want to overthrow them.

So you're saying that because there are societies that disagree with certain values that therefore there are no societies that agree with certain values? This is profoundly stupid. Disagreement is disagreement, yes, but agreement is agreement. Sometimes people agree about morality, as well as disagree about morality.

So in order for you to say they are objectively good (or "morally realistic") you have to answer why are people against them? But you won't.

Not everyone is against them. That's my answer. There isn't only disagreement, there is also agreement.

I'm not even granting that disagreement or agreement is relevant. I'm saying that if disagreement is evidence then agreement is evidence.