If morality is no more than a sense of what you ought to do that evolved due to selection pressures in past environments, and it isn't actually what you ought to do, then there is no reason for you to obey it. Upon what basis do you condemn the rational nihilist who ignores it?
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Replying to @adamckolasinski
I don't know what you mean? Why does knowing that it evolved mean it isn't actually what we ought to do? The universe doesn't care if we torture each other to extinction but humans do. We have empathy, compassion and sense of justice.
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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
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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Replying to @HPluckrose
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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Replying to @adamckolasinski
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
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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Replying to @HPluckrose
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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Replying to @adamckolasinski
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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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
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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