Since you've not written on it, who do you think has made the best case for your position, or some close approximation to it? Sam Harris? Anyone else?
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.
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Now you have reduced morality to power. We punish those who disregard others because we want to and can. You haven't established why we should.
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No, that's just what we have to do when we get an outlier who is a danger to the rest of society. I don't know how to explain to you why we should care about other people if you don't already. I think you do tho & you couldn't turn it off if you tried.
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It is in our nature to care this way. But tribalism is also in our nature and the capacity for violence & cruelty. Hence the need to talk about, work out and persuade others of the optimal moral system which benefits all of us.
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If you want something bigger than us to come & validate those aspects of us that are humane, humanitarian and humanist, I can't help you. I can only tell you and provide sources for what is already there - the best aspects of our nature and argue that it should be extended to all
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The optimal human morality would be the system which maximises human wellbeing, minimises human suffering because this is what all humans want for themselves and is extended to all humans for that reason too. We can disagree and go our own way within that on how to live.
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There is no more to it than this. You can ask how do I justify this rationally to someone who doesn't want to do it and if this requires something outside shared human needs and moral foundations to justify it, I can't. This is a human morality expanded to all humans.
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Perhaps I'm reading you incorrectly, but it appears that you are conceding that empirical reasoning alone is insufficient to provide a rational argument as to why people ought to expand their circle of empathy too all humans. Do I have that right?
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??? I really can't explain any better than that, I'm afraid. If you still don't understand what I mean, saying it all over again is unlikely to help. I am speaking to what is optimum human morality which SH explains by saying it is akin to an optimum human diet.
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