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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Replying to @HPluckrose
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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Replying to @adamckolasinski
??? 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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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
You're not following me for the reason religious people generally don't. You'd first need to accept, at least for the sake of argument, that morality is not something humans seek outside themselves but a quality of us, that we can understand as a whole load of 'is's & get right.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
I am perfectly willing to entertain the idea. What I can't understand is how all those 'is's' can possibly provide a rational argument to follow moral precepts that might, on occasion, be against our individual self interest.
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Replying to @adamckolasinski
It's the same as how all these 'is's can provide a rational argument for eating an optimal diet that might, on occasion, be against our preferences. These are different things - what is optimal and what we want to do.
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Replying to @HPluckrose
I don't think that analogy works. The argument for the optimal diet is grounded on it being in my own long-run material self interest. In contrast, to be moral I must do what is right, and that sometimes goes against even my long-run material self interest.
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Replying to @adamckolasinski
Do you see that its rational to seek facts on how to have an optimum morality if you want to be optimally moral and rational to seek facts on how best to promote your own interests if you want to do that? So when discussing morality its the former we make arguments about.
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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
If you're asking how to make people want to be moral when they want to be selfish or how to make people want to be selfish when they want to be moral, this is a different conversation to an exchange of arguments on how to be moral. Then we're into psychology or neuroscience.
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Replying to @HPluckrose @adamckolasinski
When we talk about whether there can be an empirical argument on a subject, this isn't answered 'no' by people not caring about the subject. Arguments about optimal morality assume all participants to care about optimal morality. Dealing with amoral people is a separate subject.
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This would also work with any basis for an argument about morality. I know you're not making a religious argument right now but, if you were, I couldn't say it didn't work because it won't convince people who would rather be self-interested than moral. They're just not engaging.
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