My objection isn't that you can't make MAKE people obey. My objection is that empiricism alone can't provide a rational justification why they SHOULD obey. Put another way, empiricism can't specify what should be optimized when attempting to construct the optimal morality.
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
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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/
-
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.
-
So how do you use empiricism alone to determine which are to be included in the objective function of your moral optimization problem and which are not?
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.