Just a question 4 you after you come back from your break. Have you written anything justifying your rejection of Hume's is/ought divide? I'd love to read the argument, so please send me the reference.
We'd condemn him on the grounds that we don't like to suffer & have empathy for others who suffer & anger to those who cause suffering & so we have written & unwritten rules about this. We haven't always extended our circle of empathy v far but consistent morality would do so
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But that condemnation is purely subjective. Why should he care what we think? Why should he extend the circle of empathy?
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It's not subjective. Try not having empathy.I took part in a test for psychopaths as a control subject when I was doing psychiatric nursing and had to look at neutral and upsetting images. My frontal lobe fired at pictures of people in distress. Yours must too. Can't you feel it?
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People who don't care for others are psychopaths, deeply depressed or too profoundly autistic to relate to others at all. If someone doesn't care, they don't. The rest of society has to enforce it. That remains the same wherever morality comes from. It happens now.
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I wrote some things ages ago when religious people kept saying this same thing and I posted them when they were being rude. Please excuse the tone and see the point?pic.twitter.com/DGDYhoMau3
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I c the point, but I'm not trying to argue for a theistically revealed ethics at the moment. I'm just trying to establish whether it is possible to have a normative ethics derived from pure empiricism.
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Depends what you mean by pure empiricism. The moral foundations in humans are also found to a lesser degree in other apes and social mammals. We don't have to consciously observe and reason from them to consistently come up with the same basic foundations for morality.
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Don't steal, don't lie, don't commit unjustified violence, respect your parents, cherish your children etc. We do this in different ways and we are constantly fighting our own tribalism where other groups are not included in our moral circle but its there.
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Books I could recommend on this include The Moral Animal: why we are the way we are, Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst, In search of humanism among the bonobos, The evolutionary origins of morality.
End of conversation
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