Moral realism. Shelves full of books have been written about it over many centuries. Why has no-one here heard of it?
Moral realism has been formulated in a great number of ways over the years. In my opinion never convincingly. A guy further up the thread mentioned the form of it you seem to be using.
Perhaps I was unclear. Where is your second correlate? What are you mapping onto? Where's your information coming from that you're right or wrong in light of?
If you just mean something to the effect of one should always act in a way that favours one's most dominant long-term interests, that seems to be the typical situational pragmatism account of normative ethics. As such:
A) A matter of pragmatism rather than what people would generally mean by ethics. To roughly paraphrase some guy whose name I can't remember, 'As soon as they can get away with doing otherwise they become justified in doing so.'
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B) Massively unactionable for most people. It's not clear that my higher order goals always outweigh a combination of lower order goals, or even that they should considering that rewards are going to vary over time.
I suppose you might formulate the idea that one should always act in the present such that one will have cause for the least regret in the future. That you would choose the same course of action for your past self looking back from the future as you would for your future self looking forwards from the past. Ethics would in other words be anti-akrasia.
And fair enough, maybe so. But now relating that back to discussion that you responded to I don't see how it serves one way or the other with respect to homosexuality and religion as preference choices, nor how it serves as a response to a refutation of moral universalism that arose in that discussion which you seemed to be replying to.
So - is that actually what you mean; how do you resolve the issues of relative weighting of preferences and changing situations; and if you resolve that, how do you apply it to the case in hand?
Where's your information coming from that you're right or wrong in light of?
The functional role of ethics places constraints on metaethical axioms or maxims, which, when combined with facts about preferences, can be concretised into an object level ethics.
So - is that actually what you mean; how do you resolve the issues of relative weighting of preferences and changing situations; and if you resolve that, how do you apply it to the case in hand?
I don't have a know what the One True Ethics is. I don't know what the One True Physics is either. That ...
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