One of the good things about the Enlightenment was the process that began where we test things and recognise the bad as bad and weed it out. We'll never get things perfect but this is the only way to get better.
OK. This is certainly something to tell people who claim that scientific facts by themselves create moral values and that ideas which became dominant during the Enlightenment never appeared before in any form anywhere. If that's all the convo is about, I will move on.
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1/ There was some of that. But the connection between the two is where the interesting part was. If you can’t get values from empirical facts about nature, where can we discover them? Modern philosophers tried to find them in passions (sympathy: Hume) or reason (Kant).
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But are we including our evolved brains as an empirical fact about nature? Because I think it's clear morality comes from them. If not, where? A soul? Remove the frontal lobe & morality is gone. I think I see why James was referencing magic now.
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No, not a soul. But let's say that through an iterative collective process, based on our biology (including our moral sentiments) morality develops as a part of human culture. And that's not the same as the moral sense itself or the facts.
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No, its a lot of moral senses and reason all working together.
End of conversation
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2/ Both failed. The interesting part is that by recovering ancient notions of Reason, especially Plato’s, you can get a justification for values (they don’t have to be surds) while respecting the latest science. At any rate, that’s what I’ve been arguing.
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Well, I guess it is.
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