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.
But we can get things wrong. Love thy neighbour is consistent with this looking after each other. The Golden rule is too. But what if you beat up your neighbour coz he's not the same religion as you and your morality doesn't extend to him because you see him as bad?
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You've allowed something to get in the way of the golden rule and justified it by something which doesn't work by the golden rule of looking after each other. You didn't increase wellbeing and decrease suffering. You got it wrong
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This is intuitive to me as a secular liberal humanist. Care/harm foundation and goodness coming from humanity. No dissonance. You will have the same intuitions but are likely to see them as coming from outside you. Jesus said love thy neighbour. But you feel this.
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You don't rationalise it. You don't have to stop & think whether you should beat me up coz I don't believe what you do and remember what Jesus said. You have no wish to hurt me & would help me if I needed it.
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A fundamentalist (not necessarily religious) could justify beating me up but this is because something is getting in the way of their empathy for their fellow man. They are acting against their innate morality. They are getting it wrong.
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Why. Maybe they think I'm doing harm by saying gender differences exist and society is better off if I'm too scared to do that again. But is society better off? There's a right or wrong answer. It can be established empirically but might be complicated. In other cases more so
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So we end up with a load of factors to measure but they are all 'is' if we have accepted the golden rule is what underlies human morality.
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You've given lots of food for thought. I see one big problem with your system. You seem to be assuming that evolved moral intuition rests on one foundation: care/harm. Haidt & others find at least five, & people innately differ in how they weight them. 1/
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No, I don't. I go with Haidt on those five moral foundations but to to consider them all equally positive just because they exist is the naturalistic fallacy.
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