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I deny that objective morality even exists. Or that it's a even a coherent concept!
As far as my personal subjective morality goes, I don't find it particularly difficult, not as much as say, quantum mechanics or memorizing every single fucking interaction in medicine I am expected to learn for the next set of exams I need to give.
Not that I let moral relativism stop me from being a moral chauvinist, why, yes, I prefer my own morals, and I think society would be better off adopting it.
Whether the creation of a technology is a moral good or not obviously depends on the technology, even for an unabashed transhumanist? Gain of function research? Hell no. Eliminating mosquitoes with gene drives? Hell yes. AI? Depends, will it save us or kill us? In expectation I slightly lean towards the former, even if I worry about the latter.
Civilization is a social technology in itself, us bootstrapping from Monke to apotheosis.
Of course the net sum of all technological advances since fire has been overwhelmingly positive, and if Ted K wants to disagree, sucks to be dead I guess. May we develop the technology to solve that particular problem soon.
And?
I hereby declare that it's a Human Right to be free from the tyranny of gravity, if not Israeli occupation. Look, I don't float, at least not without a rocket.
What is a Right to Internet Access without the internet? Healthcare, without at least 20th century medicine?
Ain't nobody perfect. It's still the smart decision, even if the dice or Mossad roll against you.
A little? Not that I would even frame it as a bad thing, per se. It should be clear by now that I consider morality to be quite contingent on the circumstances one finds one's self in.
You sure? I just tried it and cracked levitating. Maybe you aren't believing strongly enough.
Jokes aside, I think 'objective' morality is an incoherent concept, because objectivity is an incoherent concept! Jordan Peterson has some great discussions on how everything bottoms out to morality - basically related to relevance realization a la John Vervaeke and how there are so many facts out there (like impossible numbers) that you have to have some a priori framework to get them down to a manageable size to make decisions on.
There's also Hume's is-ought gap, if you're looking for the steelmanned version of what I think @drmanhattan16 is trying to argue.
Shoots your balloon down. One at a time, because I don't particularly want to kill you.
Maybe my chakras will stop being so lazy, if I could levitate it would save me a lot of pain in the literal ass and legs.
Hah well I appreciate your forbearance.
Don't worry about your chakras man, you just gotta believe in rights. Everyone knows the path of Human Rights will give you a far stronger foundation and easier cycling than the path of Yoga. Duh!
I read Cultivation novels, this path doesn't exist haha
It's a secret held onto by my clan for generations, I'll share it with you for some Essence of Draconic Might. Or some cocaine.
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I said nothing about objective morality.
And why is that itself a moral good?
You understand that we can abstract these things, right? For example, the right to use contemporary means of private messaging. Letters in the past, DMs today.
But you certainly seem to be indifferent to how imperfect they may be.
If the Israelis were having Predator drones (or whatever their equivalent is) bomb a random house in each block every day, would you say that's just "imperfection"? What if they decide to genocide by bullet the Palestinians entirely, but they also promise a cure for cancer?
Because I think it is? So do most people, if they're thinking straight.
Your question makes no sense without that presumption, unless you want a scan of my brain so you tease out the way the neurons fire.
Sure. But the Right To Internet Access was proposed as an addition to the usual for "Free Speech".
Could be better. Could be much worse. I give them a 8/10 for effort.
Hmm.. Harder than it looks, or not intuitively obvious to me. There are apparently 14.3 million Palestinians. ~10 million deaths from cancer a year.
Cancer doesn't usually take people in their prime, I'd know, I treat enough old people in my onco unit. Palestinians are younger than typical, apparently they think having a bunch of kids in a warzone is acceptable where richer Westerners don't.
Even so, let's assume that the average Palestinian killed this way loses 50 years of their lives. Half the people who die of cancer do so above 70, most of the other half in their fifties. Let's be generous and say the average loses 20 years of their lives, this is napkin math.
So, given my timelines for a cure for cancer the old fashioned way, maybe in 10-20 years without AGI, shorter without it..
15.3*50=765
10 * 20 * 10(years)= 2000
If I really cared, then I would adjust for Quality Adjusted Life Years due to the age of the latter population. Population growth, second order effects from 15 million people being killed, the sheer cost of the ridiculous number of missiles needed, it would cheaper to nuke them with a cleanish bomb. Risk of WW3. Yahweh intervening (honestly this one is negligible, he didn't care about the first 6 million did He?)
There you go, I'm ready to sign the form you presumably have ready when the Israelis stop holding out on us, maybe they'll share the schematics of the Jewish Space Lasers while they're being generous. RIP Palestine, but I'll buy some Raytheon stock and iodine pills while you get the pen out. Some Luxottica too, the Palestinian future is so bright that the Israelis need shades!
No, actually, that's not so clear. People may find it valuable, but an argument has to be made that creating a civilization is itself a moral good.
We can use arguments to determine what morality we want to follow even as we acknowledge it's not objective. Not that hard to understand.
You've already made it clear that you would never accept the costs if you had to pay them. It's a damning indication of just how little your stated morality means to you if you would refuse to accept its worst outcomes being applied to you.
Certainly, even if I still think my love for progress and civilization was clear enough in my parent comment. Just don't fall for the illusion that highly conserved aspects of our conserved morality are anything but the outcomes of evolution and game theory working on mammalian brains. If my arguments convince someone, and vice versa, then it's a closed loop that neither demands external grounding beyond the grinding of gears in our brains, nor needs it. You can't need what doesn't exist and that cannot exist, if you're doing something more important than trying to feel good about yourself. Even those who demand objective morality are doing just fine without it, because, once again, I stress it's incoherent.
That's like your, opinion, man. Do demonstrate how dearly you hold your stated convictions if people paraglide onto your doorstep and shoot your kids. Or don't, because honor is a poor balm for the dead.
I am unwilling to accept the same demands applied to me and mine because I value us more. You mistake me for a Benthamian who holds all people equal, including themselves, and I very much am not. If I was Palestinian, a more unfortunate fate than being merely Indian, I would keep my head down and be mostly confident I wouldn't get killed for doing so.
It doesn't really matter. I'm trying to make a morality that works for humans. A significantly constrained problem.
I would regard my emotions as irrelevant when deciding how criminals are to be treated, I wouldn't insist on a double standard for me and those who aren't me.
The difference is that your morality doesn't do anything to prevent those more powerful than you from killing you if it would benefit them. Mine would.
You stand little chance of succeeding in that endeavor, given that no end of philosophers have tried to find a moral code that is acceptable and preferable over all the others for a ~full subset of humans.
I don't think one of those even exists, even if you consider it a significantly constrained problem, for much the same reason that finding a cut of clothing that works optimally for starfish and sheep is a difficult task.
If something capable of convincing all humans of its validity (without reference to objectivity, it's just supremely satisfying and feels intuitively right) ever comes to exist, I expect it to be a problem solved by entities much smarter than us.
There are plenty of people with even less power than the minimal amount I wield, and you don't see me going around tormenting them, not even for financial gain.
I am perfectly content in letting others flourish, and even happy on their behalf, as long as I have my most pressing needs met.
The only reason human society works is that despite our moralities diverging in the edge cases, there's a strongly conserved core, with random acts of murder, theft and the like nearly universally reprehensible. True even in monkeys, or anything smart enough to understand that. Once again, for evopsych and game theory reasons, but I'm sure you understand what I'm getting at.
At the end of the day, incentive structures and fear of punishment can constrain people who aren't omnibenevolent in acting in more or less pro-social ways, which helps lubricate the rest of the problem, even if a naive approach would have you wonder otherwise.
It's not a question of success, it's a question of whether I need to believe in moral objectivism to make my argument. I don't. I only need to convince people that my morality works better for them without appeal to moral fact.
No, they are only reprehensible in human nature when we believe others have moral worth. Our instincts turn this into "anyone who is a part of my tribe" and brother, you probably aren't in the tribe of every rich Indian out there. So this isn't a strong response. That you wouldn't do it tells me nothing about what your morality does to prevent a more powerful person from just killing your for their benefit.
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