God having created the universe with a purpose is the reason we would have moral realism in the first place. Wouldn't Gods idea just be what is objectively correct then? — ChatteringMonkey
then? To what other objective standard would we be evaluating Gods idea of morality then? — ChatteringMonkey
I don't quite understand how it can make sense to say that normative statements are another type of descriptive statements, considering that distinction presumably was made precisely to separate those different kinds of statements. Wouldn't that then just collapse the whole distinction, and we'd left with just 'statements'... if normative statements are another type of descriptive statements then there would be no need for the distinction, right? I mean, sure, I'm open to the idea that there is some fundamental problem with the distinction from the start, but I'm not sure where that would lead us. — ChatteringMonkey
Yeah I think all those efforts are misguided, my maybe too simple take on it is that concerning God you either have faith or you don't.... because it's outside of the realm of empirical verification. And I think empirical verification is the only way to knowledge. Logic on its own cannot yield new knowledge, you need some data to test your theories to. — ChatteringMonkey
Take the fine tuning argument for instance. We have no access to another set of universes to compare our universe to, and so we just don't know what a typical universe would look like or what the likelihood of certain parameters being a certain value would be. It all seems purely speculative if you lack any data. — ChatteringMonkey
Even the most apparently evident and basic principles, like say "harm to myself is bad", already implies some value judgement. — ChatteringMonkey
As I have stated earlier, I’m not sure why a universe created with a purpose could change the truth status of something abstract like the truth status of moral realism. The way I see it is if creating something really big like the universe with a purpose can make moral realism true then why couldn’t creating something small with a purpose like another human being wouldn’t make moral realism true at all. Even if creating a human being isn’t as grandiose, you would think that it could make moral realism true if creating the universe with a purpose would, only that morality just wouldn’t matter as much as it would if God created the universe with a purpose. Though, I tend to think that a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning and it doesn’t make moral realism true at all. If a parent creating a child with a purpose creates zero meaning, then God creating the universe with a purpose would also give us zero meaning. This is because God creating the universe is just a much larger scale version of a parent creating a child. I don’t think it matters how much larger the scale of these sorts of acts are. Mathematically speaking, a larger number multiplied by zero is still zero. So, it’s not clear to me how you could create meaning and make moral realism true with any amount of power. — TheHedoMinimalist
Yes, my whole point is that the descriptive/normative distinction just seems arbitrary. The so-called “descriptive statements” in that distinction just refer to statements that describe everything besides things related to value and oughtness. Why should you only single out descriptions regarding value and oughtness from the definition of a descriptive statement? That would be like if I decided to make a distinction between descriptive statements and psychological statements where descriptive statements describe everything except things related to the human mind and psychological statements describe the human mind. I don’t understand how a claim can be non-descriptive. All claims seem to be describing something. I think it would make more sense to have sub-categories of descriptive claims rather than trying to claim that some claims are not descriptive. — TheHedoMinimalist
Well, it seems to me like the implication of your viewpoint here is that knowledge is impossible. This is because everything is outside the realm of empirical verification. Even if you test your theories, you cannot verify that those theories are true. For example, suppose that I have a theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I test this theory by putting water at -20 degrees Celsius and I notice that it appears to have frozen. By doing this experiment, I have only provided additional evidence to my theory that water will freeze at -20 degrees Celsius. I haven’t verified that my theory is true. This is because there are plenty of alternative explanations for why the water appeared to have been frozen after I put it under -20 degrees Celsius temperature. For example, there could be a secret intergalactic society of wizards that are actually the ones responsible for freezing all the water in the universe that will be seen by humans once it reaches 0 degrees Celsius. In reality, water stored in much colder temperatures like -20 degrees Celsius will still remain a liquid without the interference of this wizard society. Sometimes, the wizards will decide to keep some water stored at 20 degrees Celsius unfrozen if they know that it won’t be seen by humans for sure.
You can never empirically verify that this alternative theory about the wizards that I have proposed is false and thus you can never empirically verify that water freezes at -20 degrees Celsius. If you reject the wizard theory because you believe that the wizard theory is just ridiculous, then you aren’t using empirical evidence to determine that the wizard theory is wrong. Rather, you are simply relying on your intuition. You might make some interesting non-empirical arguments against the wizard theory though. You might argue that it would strange for someone to have a motivation to elicit a false belief onto humans about the freezing of water. Why would the wizards want to do such a thing exactly? It seems like it’s more likely that water just freezes on its own because of that. The argument above is not an empirical argument though but it doesn’t strike me that this argument should just be dismissed for being non-empirical. — TheHedoMinimalist
Yes, but some forms of speculation are better than others. For example, all financial investment is predicated on speculation. Nonetheless, some people are better investors than others because they are better at speculating about the future. Of course, it’s hard to know for sure which forms of speculation happen to be best but we can make educated guesses about that. — TheHedoMinimalist
Well, I wouldn’t say that “harm to myself is bad” is the most evident normative principle. Rather, I would say that the most evident normative claim is the claim about the existence of hedonic reactions. These hedonic reactions are typically provoked by stimuli from the outside world and they feel unambiguously and undeniably good or bad. Hedonic reactions that feel unambiguously and undeniably good are what we usually call pleasure while hedonic reactions that are the opposite of that are what we usually call suffering. If suffering can be said to exist objectively then reactions to stimuli from the outside world that feel unambiguously and undeniably bad can be said exist objectively. Otherwise, it’s not clear what we are talking about when we speak of suffering. How else would you define suffering? It’s seems to me that the existence of suffering itself implies the existence of objective value judgements about the way that you might be feeling at times. If you are suffering then you are compelled to make a value judgement that the stimuli that caused the suffering contains a bad aspect to it. Though, this doesn’t mean that the stimuli is bad overall as that stimuli may cause pleasure in the future or the prevention or alleviation of future suffering. This is why you can think that playing sports is usually good overall. Nonetheless, if playing a sport cause some suffering then it’s pretty intuitive to think that the sport in question has some bad aspect to it as well. As an analogy, you can think about a dress that is mostly green but contains a red outline as well. We would normally just say that this is a green dress because that’s the primary color of the dress but technically the dress also has some red in it. Similarly, we would normally say that playing sports is good because we think it’s mostly good but it does have some objectively bad aspects to it nonetheless. — TheHedoMinimalist
Parents don't 'create you' like they directly create a tool with a purpose. They only make it possible by having sex. For the rest they don't have any agency over how you will turn out, that is largely predefined by evolution. — ChatteringMonkey
Furthermore the purpose they have in mind wouldn't be objective to begin with, it's just an idea they have. — ChatteringMonkey
God not only creates us, but the whole universe with a purpose. — ChatteringMonkey
That's what would make things objective, the fact that the outside world is not inherently meaningless, but part of the grand plan. — ChatteringMonkey
God not only creates us, but the whole universe with a purpose. That's what would make things objective, the fact that the outside world is not inherently meaningless, but part of the grand plan. Being moral is not only a matter of upholding a convention we created, without the rest of the universe caring if we are moral or not, God is watching you and there will be a judgment day and you will go to hell or heaven... it presumably has material consequences outside of man-made ways we invent to enforce morality. — ChatteringMonkey
People can and do have different ideas about what you ought to do. — ChatteringMonkey
Oughtness is not something that can directly be observed in the world, which is what description means it seems to me. — ChatteringMonkey
And I'd say we don't think water freezes because of intergalactic wizards, not because it wouldn't make sense for them to have those motivations, but because we have never seen intergalactic wizards and so have no reason to assume they exist. — ChatteringMonkey
For you to sensibly infer something from the thought experiment, you already have to assume the wizards are a certain kind of being with certain kinds of motivations... you bring your knowledge of sentient beings motivations to the thought experiment. We don't know what kind of beings they are or what motivations they would have, unless we assume it and bring the knowledge we have of sentient beings to it. And I'd say we don't think water freezes because of intergalactic wizards, not because it wouldn't make sense for them to have those motivations, but because we have never seen intergalactic wizards and so have no reason to assume they exist. — ChatteringMonkey
Even if financial investments are uncertain, we do have some data and so there is something we can use to begin sensibly assigning probabilities. — ChatteringMonkey
Subjective or objective is a matter of perspective. We would call the same thing subjective from a first person perspective and objective from a third person perspective. It's a bit of a flawed distinction. — ChatteringMonkey
But again, what we are really after is whether there is one and the same morality for everybody, like there is that wall for everybody. — ChatteringMonkey
I don't agree suffering directly and unambiguously flows from hedonic reactions or pain, there definitely seem to be a mental and belief components to it. Pain and suffering are not the same, nor directly reducible to/derivable from each other it seems to me. — ChatteringMonkey
That is also why we don't particularly care about mild pain from sports or think that kind of damage to muscles is bad. In fact, it is precisely because your muscles get damaged that they get stronger. If we were to say that sport is good overall, but that particular part is objectively bad, we would want to avoid that particular part because it is bad... but we can't because it is that supposedly objectively bad part that makes it good. — ChatteringMonkey
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