Samantha

Unseen wrote:
Once again, the dictates of a moral system are advice, not facts, so the result isn’t a truth. There is no constraint on them necessitating they be realistic.

And once again, for the moral system to give advice that’s worth listening to, the moral system has to be realistic.  You wouldn’t wire a plug according to a false diagram.

Unseen wrote:
Like I said, moral systems aren’t true or false. They are helpful or they are not.

“Helpful” implies “true” or “realistic”.  Humans have morality: how does it work?  That’s what the Kantians and Utilitarians are also trying to work out.

Davis wrote:
How does your moral system solve this without avoiding all the challenges of other moral systems?

I can see the point you’re making, or rather, the question you’re asking: the appeal of these faulty moral systems is that they tell us what to do.  We should maximise well being in some way (which I agree with); we should act as if…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Simon’s system explains things (to his mind) so well that there are no problems that cause him to lose sleep at night. He couldn’t think of even one. That is very suspicious.

You’re right, I misunderstood your question.  You were talking about actual real-life moral questions; I was talking about moral philosophical ques…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Outside of its potential sociological value, which I’m unqualified to assess, your system is irrelevant as moral philosophy.

The reason I take a sociological, descriptive approach is that this is the only valid way to proceed.  Moral realists assert that “you morally ought to X because X is factually right”.  According to the is/…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
We must be able to philosophize internally, within our own minds first. To do that we must understand the history of Philosophy, the problems it has had and how our own understanding of it (or our own subjective interpretation of it, if you prefer) has shaped our own ways of thinking.

We need to be able to follow our…

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Unseen wrote:
Real moral systems go beyond that. Mill suggested doing the greatest good for the greatest number. Kant posited that we should only act in ways that we could universalize as a law for everyone. In other words, we should ask ourselves if we would be willing for everyone to act in the same way in similar circumstances. If the answer…

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Unseen wrote:
That hardly qualifies as a hard case.

It’s not meant to be a hard case; it’s an illustration of how a value that aims to achieve mutual benefit, works.

I think your ideas about morality are not very helpful to people in everyday life facing actual moral dilemmas.

I’ve always said that things are right or wrong according to…[Read more]

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
I was thinking of Hume too.

That’s an interesting article.

The bigger problem in moral philosophy is what happens if someone does not want to be good, whatever its origins?  Put simply, in what sense ought we to hold the goal of being good?  It seems one can ask “how am I rationally required to hold ‘good’ as a v…

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Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
Are you attempting to get an ought from an is?

You can get an ought from an is, if one of the is’s is a desire or goal.  In the absence of desires, goals, passions, values, etc., it’s not possible (according to David Hume, and I agree with him).

Here’s an example of groups that do immoral things, while being moral within themselves:  the Pirate Code.

Unseen wrote:
I can recognise nagging problems, I just haven’t mentioned any.

Gee, I wonder why(?). OK, give us some examples of issues in your theory yet to be explained.

I can’t think of any.  I’m sure there are some.

Value theory isn’t about standards or measures or, if so, only obliquely. The “value” in this case has more to do with what one…

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Unseen wrote:
Telling us how we make moral choices doesn’t tell us where morality comes from.

It’s the other way round – telling us where morality comes from tells us how we make moral choices.

You are doing description, not philosophy, and your descriptions are reductionist (you don’t recognize any nagging problems, there’s no area yet to be ex…

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Unseen wrote:
And yet, that often happens. Look at the January 6 conspirators, the Manhattan Project, and The Beatles. Prosecutors take advantage of this sort of thing in building cases all the time.

Then, they’re being competitive with each other and not moral.

So, but you are not engaging in moral philosophy, which would be telling us what…

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Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

Once the Romans had decided to achieve their goals at the expense of others – you still wouldn’t expect them all to turn into thieves and liars towards each other, and start fighting like rats in a sack.

Unseen wrote:
Rome did a lot to civilize the world and it do so by subjugating peoples, often brutally. Were the Roman emperors acting morally?

It’s possible to follow moral rules while doing immoral things.

Unseen wrote:
By that definition, if I were to find myself the last person on Earth and thus not a member of any community or group of any sort, could I even have a morality? Or can someone live by a code of their own without reference to anything other than himself?

By that definition, you would require instrumental rather than moral…[Read more]

unapologetic wrote:
Do you think they started from the selfish behaviors of microbes and became cooperation out of necessity?

I would say your intuitions are pretty spot on.

Normativity is the pressure to achieve goals.  Morality comes in two parts: instrumental normativity, and joint or moral normativity.  The second is the joint version of t…[Read more]

I’ve been studying evolutionary ethics for about 13 years.  I’ve found that morality is both simpler and more complicated than people think.

Morality is the self-regulation within a cooperative unit or group.  So, I govern myself; you govern me; I govern you; we govern each other and ourselves on behalf of the group, in the directionof the j…[Read more]

If only he wasn’t so overwhelmingly self-centred to the point of stupidity.