I agree you can't make a logically coherent argument for morality over amorality based on empiricism alone! That's my point. But suppose we assume all people r moral. What if they r optimizing something different than you? Empiricism is insufficient for deciding what to optimize.
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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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
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