Sometimes I worry I’m not smart enough to follow you, I had read that twice. 
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Intelligent people often ask themselves if they're smart enough. Be worried if you didn't feel you could be smarter/had something to learn.
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That's a linguistic issue. It's because pointless already smuggled in an implied ought.
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If you say 'pointless,' you've already evaluated them based on your existing values. To have a point, a desired state, you need desire to begin with. Only a desired state can produce an "ought," but scientific facts can't produce a desire.
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This really does seem to be a mental block for poor Sam. Odd considering how brilliant he is.
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IS/OUGHT Sam *ought* to quit riding this hobby-horse because he *IS* embarrassing himself.
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Hahaha gold. It’s as if he thinks this hasn’t been brought up in, oh...to be conservative...the last three centuries.
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if he’s right, he wrote the most revolutionary and important book of moral philosophy in history.
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I'm still not convinced. Like others have said, you already evaluated this suffering as pointless. Furthermore...you say that nothing *good* can come from it. How do you evaluate good w/out the ought? This is so confusing.
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maybe you've already mixed the 'ought' into your premise?
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Most people aren't refuting your conclusion, they're just insisting you recognize the move you made. Asserting that human suffering is bad and we ought to mitigate it is imminently reasonable, but it's still an imposed value.
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Every 'is' comes from an imposed value, that's Sams argument. But somehow we accept this in medicine, for example, but not in morality. Our notion of health is axiomatic in many ways, but no one uses this is/ought argument to imply that science has nothing to say about medicine
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In medicine, the value of human life is accepted axiomatically. That's a good thing, but it's still an imposition of value that doesn't come from any facts. Every "is" does not come from an implied ought.
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That's my point, and the same point Sam has made in The Moral Landscape. We do this same imposition of value in every field, so why not in morality? Every truth clame comes with associated values, like logic, respect for evidence, etc
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I'm not saying we can't make the same imposition in morality. All anyone is saying is that we need to recognize that's what we're doing.
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I agree
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You are mising the point. Even if there were such an entity, the only way for it to determine values is if we assigned value to it over everything else in the first place. So it's the same. Why should we assigne value to its word if not to mitigate suffering of conscious beings?
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When believers privilege Gods word over the Devil's (for example) they are thinkig about future suffering or reward
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Those aren't the only two possibilities. First, you have to prove there is a God. Good luck with that... Sam's argument is for knowledge and honest inquiry. If that should reveal God's existence so be it, but values would still be imposed by us
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For instance, we could find out that the only 'gods' we encounter are all shitty ones... then it would be very unwise to follow their will just because they are gods. And we would make that judgement based on how much more suffering they could impose on us
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