= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
AlwaysUnite comments on Ultimate List of Irrational Nonsense - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (61)
Well, I don't think "a bit of a middle-ground" justifies taking a stance calling full-on moral relativism "immoral, pointless & counterproductive".
"Suffering is bad" seems a lot easier to agree on as a premise than it actually is - taken by itself, just about anyone will agree, but taken as a premise for a system it implies a harm-minimising consequentialist ethical framework, which is a minority view.
And it's simple enough to consistently be pro-life but also support the death penalty: if one believes a fetus at whatever stage of development is a human life and killing it is equivalent to murder, as many pro-lifers ostensibly do, one must simply have consistent standards for when killing is okay, that include a government convicting someone of a capital crime but exclude a mother not wanting to drop out of college.
We use analogies and the occasional bit of mysticism often enough that I think references are consistent, although the term has entered the popular consciousness and become divorced enough from the original religious concept that worrying about its origins seems to be mostly an ideological purity issue, a kind of worrying that's itself pretty irrational to engage in.
But can't the same be said for rationality and science? As Descartes showed a "demon" could continuously trick us with a fake reality, or we could be in the matrix for all we know. For rationality to work we have to assume that empiricism holds true. Why couldn't the same be true for ethics? I think that if science can have its empiricism axiom, ethics can have its suffering axiom.
The problem is that ethics can work with other axioms. Someone might be a deontologist, and define ethics around bad actions e.g. "murder is bad", not because the suffering of the victim and their bereaved loved ones is bad but because murder is bad. Such a set of axioms results in a different ethical system than one rooted in consequentialist axioms such as "suffering is bad", but by what measure can you say that the one system is better than the other? The difference is hardly the same as between attempting rationality with empiricism vs without.
There is a difference, I'll be posting it Friday. I've got an exam tomorrow and it still needs some finishing touches. This project got a bit out of hand, the complete train of thought is about 4 pages long to explain properly, so a post is more appropriate than a comment. I'd like to hear your opinion on it, if you are willing :)
Because if you disbelieve empiricism and jump off a tall building, you will die. If you disbelieve ethics of suffering and become evil, you get to build a lair with slave girls and a white cat.
If you disbelieve in empiricism and jump of a building you may die. If all of reality actually is a simulation, there is no telling what will happen.
I don't recommend testing this X-/
Neither do I :) But the possibility exists, we just assume it doesn't.
The possibility of anything you can think of (and everything you can't think of, too) exists. So what?
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
I apparently still do not entirely get the commenting system here. Apologies.
Well, then it's also inconsistent to be relativistic about gastronomy. And wine. And fashion. And books. And prettiness.
If you say A, you've got to go through the whole alphabet :-)
On the other side, of course, is what is basically Samuel Johnson's refutation. You want to deny empirical reality and science, maybe I'll even come to your funeral. You want to deny some particular ethics, well, what will happen?