Yeah, the question though is whether we ought to allow ourselves to be driven by anything that's not rationally verifiable, whether we should allow ourselves to be moved by imaginary beings, or posited-without-evidence beings, etc., etc.

To some degree it can be a harmless hippy sort of thing, but on the other hand it's also led to a lot of death and suffering in the past (e.g. religious wars, some types of political struggle, etc.).

No it's not biological determinism, it's that human nature is like a tether - you have a fair bit room to wander over possible-social-rule space, some room for variation, but there are limits (just as we can't fly unaided, something like "kill everyone you meet" isn't a possible social rule, whereas you can imagine it being a possible social rule with some weird alien species that's very different from us).

If the biology changes, that's like the position of the stake (to which the tether is tied) changing. Up till now that's only been possible with fairly slow evolutionary changes, but it's possible that technology might enable faster change now.

Essentially, it's like this: a morality is a set of possible social rules, out there somewhere in possible-social-rule space, that maximizes human flourishing, given our biology and the given nature of the world in general. That makes the pattern of rules objective.

However, you could choose any goal to maximize (for example, "maximize what's best for me and my cronies") and another equally objective pattern of possible social rules would fall out. That's the element in morality that's subjective - the choice of that ultimate goal which crystallizes some particular objective pattern of social rules (again, given human nature and the nature of the world).

But there's a fair amount of continuity and crossover between the older maximization goal given us by our biology ("survive and reproduce") and the newer goals we are developing consciously that are more or less built on top of that - which generally fall into a basket of closely-related ultimate goals, something like "maximize human flourishing", or "maximize happiness," or "live virtuously."

There are enough people with innate goodwill and benevolence to make some selection from that basket the type of ultimate goal that most people do in fact tend to have (and encourage/enforce), therefore most moral rules and laws will tend to maximize that generally benevolent goal. But of course that's all debatable, and human beings do debate it all the time.

The problem is that you have a God-shaped hole :)

To unpack that: we are born with "why"-asking machinery in our brains, and that machinery, which normally has a pragmatic point (is useful in life) just naturally tends to keep asking "why?" At which point it bumps up against the question of existence as a whole - why existence as a whole?

But consider: normally, asking why depends on relative juxtaposition of things. Why this? Because that, because some other thing. But there's no "other thing" against which existence as a whole can be juxtaposed. Unless you posit it. And that's "God." If God is defined as self-existent, unmoved Mover, etc., then the why-series comes to an intellectually satisfying end.

But the problem is, nobody has any evidence of God, unless they're just circularly arguing that existence itself is the evidence of God.

So since the 18th/19th centuries, the position has increasingly been taken that since there's no evidence for God, there's no need to worry about Him. But because the "why" question is compulsive, we keep bumping up against a God-shaped-hole. The final question has no satisfying answer.

Which is why some people have taken to transcendentalizing secular goals (e.g. equality). But that's no use either (and leads to megadeaths).

The road less travelled here is simply to suspend judgement and be ok with suspending judgement. Acknowledge that we simply don't yet have a satisfying answer to that ultimate question. The God answer could be the right answer, but we have no way of deciding or figuring it out, or deciding between that and the universe being a stupendous accident.

So the problem becomes one of being ok with not knowing. And also realizing that all the normal human stuff seems to get along quite well without having to know. For example, you are born with a certain level of benevolence (it varies along a bell-curve, and some don't have it - human sharks, so to speak) and your parents probably trained you to be nice. The lack of an answer to that fundamental question doesn't mean you have to go against that inclination and training, and turn yourself into a serial killer who never gets up in the morning.

Or to put it in the cute terms of Werner Erhard's est seminars: it's all empty and meaningless, but the fact that it's empty and meaningless is itself empty and meaningless. Now, to be strictly accurate, we don't actually know that it's empty and meaningless either (for all we know, it might be full and meaningful after all, and one or all of the God solutions human beings have come up with might be right); but if it is empty and meaningless, then that solution applies: the fact that it's empty and meaningless doesn't affect us one way or the other, it has no implications for our daily lives, and changes nothing.

That would presuppose a standard for "good" that's outside what's good for humans. But that would only be a standard chosen by some humans (e.g. nature loving humans).

Generally speaking, "good" is a relative term. What's good for a virus isn't good for humans, and vice-versa. But it's also objective in another sense, in that what's good for humans is objectively good for humans and objectively bad for viruses, and vice-versa.

So the situation is like this: morally good is what's objectively good for human flourishing, it's quite a limited concept, not a "cosmic" concept. Human flourishing may be objectively bad for some other creatures, but that doesn't mean it's morally bad, not until it gets to the point where it impacts human flourishing.

And that has a sliding scale from discomfort to outright impoverishment, which is why we listen to nature lovers' complaints. Their complaint might be something that's only making them, personally, uncomfortable, in which case it's not really a moral problem, even if they pose it that way; but it might be something that portends a larger problem for human flourishing in general, in which case it does become a moral problem.

So for example, a human liking for certain types of finches and discomfort at their disappearance isn't yet showing up a moral problem; but if human beings were to foul their own nest to the extent of something like, say, those envisioned s-f dystopias that picture an entire planet as given over to industry, with a polluted atmosphere, etc., etc., then that would be a moral problem. In that case, it would also be true to say that, objectively speaking, we'd turned out to be like a virus for other forms of life, but the moral aspect of it would only be in the aspect that affects us and our own flourishing.

I don't think there are any moral changes, what happens is that the relatively stable features of human nature and the world are always juxtaposed against the expansion of possibilities due to technology - so that creates new domains with new possibilities about which new moral questions can be asked.

It's possible that there might be more profound moral change, in a sense, if human nature itself becomes more malleable through technology though, e.g. genetic engineering. But supposing that happened, then that would just be a new kind of morality for a new kind of being, the moral principles for "good old-fashioned human beings" would stay the same.

If the changes went far enough, morality might not apply at all (as it doesn't with most animals), because to an extent morality as a practice (a thing to do, a way to be) is quite parochial (it depends on us being social animals, for example).

If something doesn't have any effect on perception, then it makes no difference to us human beings whether it exists or not; there can be no evidence for it, so there's nothing to discuss (other than in terms of speculation). Certainly, one cannot make intellectual, moral or political policy proposals based on it.

I think ethics does presuppose a human nature, and also a nature-of-the-world. It presupposes that things and people have innate tendencies, innate patterns of behaviour, that make for overall benevolent interactions and social order, but which aren't perfectly distributed (because bell curve distributions, etc.) and may need a bit of nudging along now and then (hence moral/legal rules).

It's easy to see how this is grounded in biology and physics, but unfortunately that clashes with the currently-fashionable and authoritarian PC cult, so everyone has to pretend there's no such thing as human nature (and not two genders, etc., etc., etc.).

Without human/world nature, which is the grounding for natural law, then either morality is the result of command (God's command) or it doesn't exist (relativism is basically nihilism). The problem with morality being God's command is that ethics trumps commands (e.g. if God commanded you to eat your firstborn, you would revolt).

Generally speaking, I think non-physical things that are real are mostly patterns, relatively stable patterns of behaviour, of interaction, etc., of physical things.

Physical things are things that are amenable to perceptual cognition, or perceptual cognition via scientific instruments.

There are two aspects to this, the first is the two world wars and their respective aftermaths, the second is the more purely academic cults of Critical Theory and Postmodernism.

The first factor is the reason why the intelligentsia in general have had a somewhat crestfallen demeanour throughout much of the 20th century, and that atmosphere still lingers. Prior to that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, people were more optimistic because they could see the results of classical liberalism in terms of actual progress - real progress along many dimensions, for the first time in humanity's existence. But confidence in that older liberal order fell with the debacle of two world wars, which some felt "weren't supposed to happen" in terms of the older classical liberal predictions.

And this general lack of confidence is what's given a wedge for the more particular, more bizarre and crabbed forms of the PC cult to hold sway in universities.

Strictly speaking, "designed" is really just a shorthand for the evolutionary explanation for the existence of organisms. Nothing is actually designed by evolution in a literal sense, it's rather that the product of evolution appears as if designed.

But it would be too prolix and tedious to preface every explanation with the whole evolutionary argument, so the shorthand is used.

However, I suspect this foreshortening does give some hostages to fortune, in that some people perhaps think of evolution as in some sense as some kind of unitary, god-like power. It's perhaps natural for religious people to make this mistake (they think the evolutionist is substituting a sort of materialistic god-like being for God), but rationalists shouldn't make this mistake (which I think some do, perhaps unconsciously), and should always be clear that it's just a shorthand placeholder for the full explanation.

Strictly speaking the evolutionary argument shows how things that appear as if they have been designed can come about without anything actually designing them. It's an accidental process, certainly, but it's also cumulative (good accidents are kept, bad accidents aren't), and the cumulativeness is how you eventually get the appearance of design.

But even in the above paragraph, you'll notice I've used the words "good" and "bad" - and even that can give the appearance of purpose. But really, "good" just boils down to "happens to fit in with the ecosystem in a way that allows the organism to survive and reproduce", and "bad" means the opposite.

perhaps ultimately — A Seagull

The general etymology seems to be related to "faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant," from Germanic abstract noun *treuwitho, from Proto-Germanic treuwaz "having or characterized by good faith". A solid oak would be something like a metaphor for someone who is trustworthy.

Not that etymology is some magic key, just that it shows something like the genealogy of a concept, and in this case it's related to trustworthiness Truth is that which you can rely on.

Which is exactly how it is, more or less. You can still be betrayed by a loyal friend, for any number of reasons, but generally loyal friends are loyal friends, and you can rely on them, lean on them. Likewise, at an epistemological level, we know we are fallible, we can sometimes be mistaken when we were ever so sure; but we also know that lots of things about which we are ever so sure are reliable.

This is obviously also related to the pragmatic insight: truth is a guide to action. Propositions set up in us expectations as to how the world is likely to behave in response to our actions. These are our "beliefs" (again, "belief" is etymologically related to faith too).

But I think it's important to note that our beliefs are not knowledge as such, knowledge as such is the picture painted for us by the words, which we can believe or not - these propositions we secondarily call "beliefs" too, but that's been the source of a lot of confusion in philosophy.

The primary sense is all about trust in expectations, which are set up by propositions which are then only secondarily called "beliefs." But if you take that reification seriously, then you have the futile search for things "in the head" ("in the mind") that have a similar structure to the structure of propositions.

We do have things in the head, but they're expectations that are triggered by the propositions, which are objective artifacts in the world (which is why the things going on in the head can vary from person to person and time to time, while the propositional structure that triggers them is invariant, and depends on objective rules, standing social habits, etc.).

I think we can cut through a whole lot of bullshit about belief and truth by looking at the etymology of "true". It has to do with trust.

Belief is a form of trust/expectation - trust/expectation that the world is the way words propose the world is. And that's all it is, it's not a form of knowledge, nor is knowledge a modified form of belief.

Knowledge is more like "aperiodic crystals" (language, symbols, digits, DNA, etc.) that have an objective structure, that's mediated through our habits (how we "take" those symbols, how we use them, how we embody their instructions) that induce us into particular ways of interacting with the world, with particular expectations and trusts, that are either satisfied or baulked.

True is what's trustworthy.

If there isn't an external world, then all of our words don't refer to, or mean, anything. We would never be talking about things that exist independent of the words themselves, or states-of-affairs that exist independent of our experience of them. Language is built on the premise of object permanence. — Harry Hindu

Yeah, I think this is one of the few settled things we can say in all this area. Things like Idealism and phenomenalism are actually incoherent, since they're using shared language, which presupposes the validity of the concept of external objects, to cast wholesale doubt on external objects (in a "discussion" no less! :) ). The very idea of doubting the external world is incoherent because "the game of doubt" itself presupposes an external world. You can only cast doubt on (one) external object by accepting the existence of (some other) external objects.

The Argument from Illusion, which is usually where these sorts of lucubrations start, moves from the possibility of illusion, to the possibility of wholesale illusion, but that move can't possibly be made, because the very existence and concept of illusion is only possible, only has meaning, in a context where we sometimes do experience reality.

IOW, the only reason we can peg a given experience an "illusion" at all, is because we've had a corrective perception that induces us to believe the previous experience was illusory; but that corrective perception must itself be non-illusory otherwise it couldn't correct the illusory perception, and it couldn't be illusory.