To clarify on "is this cultural relativism?" I was attempting to claim the following: 1) it is actions, not people, that are subject to moral judgment 2) it is individuals, not an agentic God, that makes moral judgments Could be theologically argued that (2) is relativist.
Something like: Humans are the highest expression of natural complexity, take that as good, so human life and relations should be maintained. Not saying it's precise, but it's good enough to recognize "degeneracy" like child sex abuse.
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I don’t know if this works, since I could build Rube Goldberg machines of arbitrary complexity, more complex than any human, and then in this model, they would have more moral value than humans
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That's part of why it's imprecise, because complexity is not standardized. How many humans equal one of your Rube Goldberg's? n/a
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OTOH child sexual abuse seems totally unrelated to universal complexity
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Inductive reasoning: Sex abuse leads to trauma, addiction, therefore a less a productive society. A meteor might smash Earth in 300 years. Our preparation (survival) may be a function of how much sex abuse went unchecked. Thus, sex abuse is contrary to universal complexity.
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Point of my example is that this moral framework can consistently judge what is "evil". Striving for "good" is a matter of accumulating complexity (or technocapital?), the end justifying the means. Competitors and natural cataclysms set the stage; adapt or die.
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This puts morality on non-relativistic grounds. In a sense, "god" is the force of natural selection - the final judge, the wages of sin being death.
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Complexity/technocapital is then a virtue and the only way to beat the planet's time-limit. Onto the next challenge, requiring more complexity.
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The main flaw I see is defining "complexity". Apparently it's challenging to define rigorously (is it systematic? meta-systematic? mathematical? physical?), and even if we could, there's a subjectivity flaw: how can we know that humans are capable of judging universal complexity?
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