Posted by special_k on March 20, 2006, at 3:33:34
In reply to Re: am i allowed to say..., posted by Dr. Bob on March 20, 2006, at 2:21:18
> ... or that you believe it would be immoral for you yourself to do whatever.
ah. like the faith board. yeah okay i think i understand that one...
though... still having trouble with genocide etc... i don't want to say that genocide is a bad thing for ME to do i want to say that it is a bad thing for ANYONE to do... but i get how people might feel offended if you proclaim acts to be 'immoral'...
but then you can go one step back to WHY you think it is immoral (and hence just leave the immoral bit out of it altogether)... i'm okay with that...
> > see... i believe in moral facts. i am not alone. lots of people (philosophers) believe in moral facts. discovering those moral facts... is tricky... and candidates for moral facts are fairly debatable...> If it's tricky, it might be best not to try it here...
:-(
it isn't so much about the discovery of moral facts (just like it isn't so much about discovering the essential nature of truth / knowledge / goodness / belief / god etc) as it is about what you learn on the journey...
you don't really find out the essential nature... but you find how how lots of candidates for the essential nature go wrong and hence come to a better understanding of what an adequate theory would look like... the kinds of problem cases it would have to handle etc...
i do believe in moral facts... mostly because if you don't believe in moral facts then you have trouble in saying what makes it true to say 'torturing an innocent child for fun is morally wrong'. assuming it is true of course. but then if you don't think that is true the general idea is that you lack a moral sense (and i don't mean that to be a criticism or put down...)
ethics is supposed to be about something along the lines of 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you' and so i suppose that i can get my head around an egocentric ethics (egocentric not in the sense of 'me first' but egocentric in the sense of this is my moral code and according to my moral code these are the moral facts)... but still the theory goes that if we were ideally rational (ideally in the sense of infinite cognitive powers / resources and perhaps (though not necessarily) had access to all the relevant facts) then there would be convergence. i guess that is a bit controversial... but convergence seems to be the accepted view
(though quine for example thinks that there could be an indefinate number of final sciences (consisting of theorietical entities) that could perfectly explain and predict all the past present and future nerve hits (observations) of mankind... and if he is right... maybe this is true of the ethical laws as well...)
but agreeing to disagree... is like giving up on discussion.
:-(
i guess it is peoples choice...
but isn't it something to aim for?
(and i don't mean that in the sense of aiming to persuade people of your view... i mean it more in the sense of articulating your view clearly and revising the probability of your beliefs downward and finding... convergence)
isn't it something to aim for?
i like to think rational people would agree (once sharing a knowledge base of relevant information).
because otherwise... what hope is there?
wah.
maybe i'm just hopelessly idealistic...
PS on a related note...
do you think there are an indefinate number of mathematical models so that rational people can disagree there? or... convergence once again... why should science / ethics / politics be any different?
poster:special_k
thread:621784
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060304/msgs/622386.html