Monday, May 15, 2017

chumpwaxer asked: Do you believe that moral realism is false in the sense that there's some property that the world could conceivably have had that would have made moral realism true, but that in fact it doesn't have? Or is moral realism not even sufficiently coherent/well-defined to be false in that sense?

argumate:

That’s a tough one. You could easily imagine we live in a world arranged by a malicious programmer who enforces some kind of karma system or afterlife or whatever, but then it’s not clear why that deserves to be called morality rather than mere physics, and it leaves you with a problem of infinite regress (what moral realism applies to the programmer in that situation).

Which seems to straightforwardly imply that moral realism is not sufficiently coherent/well-defined to be false in that sense.

Posted at 4:02 AM 35 notes Reblogged from argumate

Notes

  1. argumate said: yes, exactly. much like how if magic worked in an explicable way, it wouldn’t be magic, just fancy physics.
  2. stumpyjoepete reblogged this from argumate
  3. bambamramfan reblogged this from fnord888
  4. academicianzex reblogged this from argumate and added:
    You’re right that the correct analogy is to mathematical realism, but I think you’re kind of assuming what you’re trying...
  5. argumate said: surely things outside your lightcone *don’t* exist to you, even if they do exist to others, but abstract entities don’t exist to *anyone*
  6. bpd-anon reblogged this from argumate
  7. fluffshy reblogged this from argumate and added:
    Just because the true definition of murder is very complicated and we don’t fully understand, it doesn’t mean that there...
  8. chenelson reblogged this from argumate
  9. argumate reblogged this from fluffshy and added:
    Seems tricky, because “murder” is an incredibly complicated concept that takes massive amounts of work to unpack; even...
  10. argumate said: I guess technically that could work on humans if the “argument” was allowed to include arbitrary hypnotic frequencies of light and sound to the extent that it could reprogram anyone into agreement.
  11. fnord888 reblogged this from argumate and added:
    I intended the “the explanation being a universally compelling argument for the morality of those preferences” to be an...
  12. argumate said: I would be curious to hear these criteria!
  13. scientiststhesis reblogged this from argumate