The best analogy you have used on this topic is health and medicine. We bring value judgments into our notions of what it means to be healthy. Health is a relative and subjective standard, but we can still have an objective science of medicine that informs it. Same with ethics.
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And if someone shows up at the oncology conference and says having cancer is a sign of good health, he isn't invited back the next year...
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Actually, mathematicians do have to justify the claim that 2 + 9 = 11. Whitehead and Russell spent 300 pages proving 1+1=2...
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It's important to note that these guys were trolling. There are many ways to arrive at definitions for addition (or even numbers) in math in less than a few sentences https://math.stackexchange.com/a/15905 . However, humans added numbers together way before there was any "justification" for it.
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Wouldn’t someone have to know the future in order to categorize something as “pointless”?
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Yep. From the perspective of the unknowing ever-present, it is an enormous claim frivolously made.
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"pointless misery is bad" is a tautology, not an insight. What experiences are bad is the core question that has still not been addressed.
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G.E Moore's open question argument applies to definitions of Bad/Good. He states, there is no singular definition of good or bad because the statement "This is bad" requires a second statement explaining why. A tautology such as 'you should avoid this because it is bad' is .....
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Pretty useless as a foundation for morality. A question that only serves to circle itself is no help to anyone. What Harris needs are axioms, not tautologies.
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The evangelists of pointless misery have probably skin in the game of misery. They are either the companies of antidepressants or people who use victimization as a tool for favorable treatment. There is absolutely no logic behind pointless misery.
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er we all have skin in the game of reality making pharmaceuticals isn't wrong, of course it can be done wrong having motives isn't wrong, of course you can have bad motives personal benefit, lel, such evil if all you're saying is that people are cunts then I agree
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But one could say that "events have causes" and other "is" claims all have explanatory value that this moral "ought" claim lacks. The "many experiences really and truly suck" experience is perfectly compatible with a world with mind-independent moral truths and one without.
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There's a fair bit of discussion of this topic in the
#EffectiveAltruism community (e.g. https://casparoesterheld.com/2016/01/25/mathematical-versus-moral-truth/ …), given its importance for finding the most effective ways to improve the far future. - 1 more reply
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Then you don't need to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. Your original 'ought' claim is taken to be self-evidently true, and any other ought claims you make rely on this claim in conjunction with 'is' claims (and possibly some other derived 'ought' claims)
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The problem is meaningless labels that don’t fit reality. Is falling in love pointless misery or the apex of happiness?
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All of these have, at various times, been challenged and given justifications. Whether one accepts the justifications is a separate question. But it's just not true that in science and philosophy we have axioms that stand in no need of justification or that cannot be questioned.
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