Comment on What is Metaethics?

Wed, 04 May 2011 14:12:24 GMT

You've written quite a lot of words but you're still stuck on the idea that all importance is instrumental importance, importance for something that doesn't need to be impoitant in itself. You should care about morality because it is a value and values are definitionally what is important and what should be cared about. If you suddenly started liking vanilla.nothing important would change. You wouldn't stop being you, and your new self wouldn't be someone your old self would hate. That wouldn't be the case if you suddenly started liking murder or gas chambers. You don't now like people who like those things, and you wouldn't now want to become one.

I claim that if we understand what is going on, we'll all prefer to make the latter choice pragmatically.

If we understand what is going on , we should make the choice correctly -- that is, according to rational norms. If morality means something other than the merely pragmatic, we should not label the pragmatic as the moral. And it must mean something different because it is an open, investigatable question whether some instrumentally useful thing is also ethically good, whereas questions like "is the pragmatic useful" are trivial and tautologous.

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