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The human sacrifice is only tolerable in a society if the remaining conscious beings can replace those being sacrificed.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#44. EpistemologySuppose, for the sake of the argument, that there are moral facts. Suppose even that the moral facts are properly thought of as at least compatible with science. One thing Moore’s Open Question Argument still seems to show is that no appeal to natural facts discovered by scientific method would establish that the moral facts are one way rather than another. That something is pleasant, or useful, or satisfies someone’s preference, is perfectly compatible with thinking that it is neither good nor right nor worth doing. The mere fact that moral facts might be compatible with natural facts does nothing to support the idea that we could learn about the moral facts. David Hume seems to have been, in effect, pressing this point long before Moore, when he argued that no moral conclusion follows non-problematically from nonmoral premises (Hume 1739). No “ought,” he pointed out, followed from an “is”—without the help of another (presupposed) “ought.” More generally, there is no valid inference from nonmoral premises to moral conclusions unless one relies, at least surreptitiously, on a moral premise. If, then, all that science can establish is what “is” and not what ought to be, science cannot alone establish moral conclusions.
The open-question argument is a philosophical argument put forward by British philosopher G. E. Moore in §13 of Principia Ethica (1903),[1] to refute the equating of the property of goodness with some non-moral property, X, whether natural (e.g. pleasure) or supernatural (e.g. God's command). That is, Moore's argument attempts to show that no moral property is identical to a natural property.[2] The argument takes the form of a syllogism modus tollens:Premise 1: If X is (analytically equivalent to) good, then the question "Is it true that X is good?" is meaningless.Premise 2: The question "Is it true that X is good?" is not meaningless (i.e. it is an open question).Conclusion: X is not (analytically equivalent to) good.The type of question Moore refers to in this argument is an identity question, "Is it true that X is Y?" Such a question is an open question if a conceptually competent speaker can question this; otherwise it is closed. For example, "I know he is a vegan, but does he eat meat?" would be a closed question. However, "I know that it is pleasurable, but is it good?" is an open question; the answer cannot be derived from the meaning of the terms alone.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 04/02/2022 10:08:51The human sacrifice is only tolerable in a society if the remaining conscious beings can replace those being sacrificed.You are confusing society with people. Politicians are perfectly happy to sacrifice others for their own benefit. Given absolute authority over some 65,000,000 people, our Beloved Leader would happily immolate the 64,000,000 who don't directly contribute to His wellbeing.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#55. SemanticsMoral realists have here been characterized as those who hold that moral claims purport to report facts, that they are evaluable as true or false in light of whether the facts are as the claims purport, and that at least some such claims are actually true. Many have thought there are good reasons—even decisive reasons—for rejecting moral realism so conceived.
Tolerable here simply means it doesn't cause the extinction of the society.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 08/02/2022 20:56:27Tolerable here simply means it doesn't cause the extinction of the society.But what's the big deal with preservation of society? Civilisations have come and gone. People matter, organisations don't.
Thousands of organisations and hundreds of civilisations, all different, have disappeared. People remain pretty much the same.
objection against moral realism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#CharMoraAntiReal1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realismTraditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to X is to hold that X exists objectively. On this view, moral anti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral properties—or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. (whatever categories one is willing to countenance)—exist objectively. This could involve either (1) the denial that moral properties exist at all, or (2) the acceptance that they do exist but this existence is (in the relevant sense) non-objective. There are broadly two ways of endorsing (1): moral noncognitivism and moral error theory. Proponents of (2) may be variously thought of as moral non-objectivists, or idealists, or constructivists. So understood, moral anti-realism is the disjunction of three theses:moral noncognivitismmoral error theorymoral non-objectivismUsing such labels is not a precise science, nor an uncontroversial matter; here they are employed just to situate ourselves roughly. In this spirit of preliminary imprecision, these views can be initially characterized as follows:Moral noncognitivism holds that our moral judgments are not in the business of aiming at truth. So, for example, A.J. Ayer declared that when we say “Stealing money is wrong” we do not express a proposition that can be true or false, but rather it is as if we say “Stealing money!!” with the tone of voice indicating that a special feeling of disapproval is being expressed (Ayer [1936] 1971: 110). Note how the predicate “… is wrong” has disappeared in Ayer’s translation schema; thus the issues of whether the property of wrongness exists, and whether that existence is objective, also disappear.The moral error theorist thinks that although our moral judgments aim at the truth, they systematically fail to secure it: the world simply doesn’t contain the relevant “stuff” to render our moral judgments true. For a more familiar analogy, compare what an atheist usually claims about religious judgments. On the face of it, religious discourse is cognitivist in nature: it would seem that when someone says “God exists” or “God loves you” they are usually asserting something that purports to be true. However, according to the atheist, the world isn’t furnished with the right kind of stuff (gods, afterlife, miracles, etc.) necessary to render these assertions true. The moral error theorist claims that when we say “Stealing is morally wrong” we are asserting that the act of stealing instantiates the property of moral wrongness, but in fact there is no such property, or at least nothing in the world instantiates it, and thus the utterance is untrue.Non-objectivism (as it will be called here) allows that moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective. The slogan version comes from Hamlet: “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” For a quick example of a non-objective fact, consider the different properties that a particular diamond might have. It is true that the diamond is made of carbon, and also true that the diamond is worth $1000, say. But the status of these facts seems different. That the diamond is carbon seems an objective fact: it doesn’t depend on what we think of the matter. (We could all be under the impression that it is not carbon, and all be wrong.) That the diamond is worth $1000, by contrast, seems to depend on us. If we all thought that it was worth more (or less), then it would be worth more (or less).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#Nonc3.1 NoncognitivismOn the face of it, when we make a public moral judgment, like “That act of stealing was morally wrong,” what we are doing is asserting that the act of stealing in question instantiates a certain property: moral wrongness. This raises a number of extremely thorny metaethical questions: What kind of property is moral wrongness? How does it relate to the natural properties instantiated by the action? How do we have epistemic access to the property? How do we confirm whether something does or does not instantiate the property? (And so on.) The difficulty of answering such questions may lead one to reject the presupposition that prompted them: One might deny that in making a moral judgment we are engaging in the assignment of properties at all. Such a rejection is, roughly speaking, the noncognitivist proposal. (See entry for moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism.)It is impossible to characterize noncognitivism in a way that will please everyone. Sometimes it is presented as a view about mental states and sometimes about moral language. This is because it is a claim about “moral judgments,” and we can consider moral judgments either as private mental acts or as public utterances. If we are thinking of moral judgments as mental states, then noncognitivism is the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs. If we are thinking of moral judgments as speech acts, then noncognitivism is the view that moral judgments do not express beliefs—i.e., it is the view that moral judgments are not assertions. Here, for brevity, the latter formulation will be preferred.If moral judgments are not assertions, then what are they? Here the different kinds of answers give rise to different forms of noncognitivism. Ayer, as was mentioned earlier, maintained that when we make a moral judgment we are expressing certain feelings, such as approval or disapproval. Another influential kind of noncognitivism called “prescriptivism” claims that moral judgments are really veiled commands whose true meaning should be captured using the imperative mood: Someone who says “Stealing is morally wrong” is really saying something like “Don’t steal!” (see Carnap 1935: 24–25). R.M. Hare (1952, 1963) restricted this to commands that one is willing to universalize.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#ErroTheo3.2 Error TheoryThe error theorist is a cognitivist: maintaining that moral judgment consists of beliefs and assertions. However, the error theorist thinks that these beliefs and assertions are never true. (The error theorist contrasts here with what can be called the “success theorist.”) Moral judgments are never true because the properties that would be necessary to render them true—properties like moral wrongness, moral goodness, virtue, evil, etc.—simply don’t exist, or at least are not instantiated. Defenders of moral error theory include Mackie 1977, Hinckfuss 1987, Joyce 2001, and Olson 2014.If I assert that my dog is a reptile, then I’ve asserted something false—though in this case there are other things that are reptiles. If I assert that my dog is a unicorn then again I’ve asserted something false—though in this case there’s nothing in the actual world to which I could attach the predicate “… is a unicorn” and end up with a true assertion. The error theorist thinks that employing moral discourse is rather like talking about unicorns, though in the case of unicorns most people now know that they don’t exist, while in the case of moral properties most people are unaware of the error. To be an error theorist about unicorns doesn’t require that you think unicorns are impossible creatures; it’s enough that you think that they simply don’t actually exist. In the same way, to be a moral error theorist doesn’t require that you think that moral properties couldn’t possibly exist; it would be enough to think that they are never actually instantiated. (Note that there may be a difference between saying “Property P is never actually instantiated” and “Property P doesn’t exist,” but that’s a problem for metaphysicians to sort out. Holding either view with respect to moral properties is enough to make one a moral error theorist.)
3.3 Non-objectivismTo deny both noncognitivism and the moral error theory suffices to make one a minimal moral realist. Traditionally, however, moral realism has required the acceptance of a further thesis: the objectivity of morality. “Moral non-objectivism” denotes the view that moral facts exist and are mind-dependent (in the relevant sense), while “moral objectivism” holds that they exist and are mind-independent. (Note that this taxonomy makes the two contraries rather than contradictories; the error theorist and the noncognitivist count as neither objectivists nor non-objectivists. The error theorist may, however, be an objectivist in a different sense: in holding that objectivity is a feature of morality conceptually speaking.) Let us say that if one is a moral cognitivist and a moral success theorist and a moral objectivist, then one is a robust moral realist.Yet this third condition, even more than the first two, introduces a great deal of messiness into the dialectic, and the line between the realist and the anti-realist becomes obscure (and, one might think, less interesting). The basic problem is that there are many non-equivalent ways of understanding the relation of mind-(in)dependence, and thus one philosopher’s realism becomes another philosopher’s anti-realism. At least one philosopher, Gideon Rosen, has expressed pessimism that the relevant notion of objectivity can be sharpened to a useful philosophical point:To be sure, we do have “intuitions” of a sort about when the rhetoric of objectivity is appropriate and when it isn’t. But these intuitions are fragile, and every effort I know to find the principle that underlies them collapses. We sense that there is a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism … but after a point, when every attempt to say just what the issue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude that despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is ultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss. (1994: 279. See also Dworkin 1996.)As Rosen says, metaphors to mark non-objectivism from objectivism are easy to come by and easy to motivate in the uninitiated. The objectivist about X likens our X-oriented activity to astronomy, geography, or exploration; the non-objectivist likens it to sculpture or imaginative writing. (These are Michael Dummett’s metaphors (1978: xxv).) The objectivist sees the goal of our inquiries as being to “carve the beast of reality at the joints” (as the popular paraphrase of Plato’s Phaedrus puts it); the non-objectivist sees our inquiries as the application of a “cookie cutter”: imposing a noncompulsory conceptual framework onto an undifferentiated reality (to use Hilary Putnam’s equally memorable image (1987: 19)). The objectivist sees inquiry as a process of detection, our judgments aiming to reflect the extension of the truth predicate with respect to a certain subject; the non-objectivist sees inquiry as a process of projection, our judgments determining the extension of the truth predicate regarding that subject.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/Consequentialism, as its name suggests, is simply the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. This historically important and still popular theory embodies the basic intuition that what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future, because we cannot change the past, so worrying about the past is no more useful than crying over spilled milk. This general approach can be applied at different levels to different normative properties of different kinds of things, but the most prominent example is probably consequentialism about the moral rightness of acts, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind.
How did people look like a million years ago? How did they behave?How about their ancestor from 100 million years ago?
At least in principle, unicorn can be created using genetic engineering.
If there is no mindful/conscious entity in the universe, then there's no way to verify if an assertion/belief about a fact is true or false,
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 10/02/2022 14:05:42How did people look like a million years ago? How did they behave?How about their ancestor from 100 million years ago?Homo sapiens has not been around for a million years. There isn't a consistent definition of species but by consensus all members of a species have a lot of characteristics in common.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 10/02/2022 14:50:51At least in principle, unicorn can be created using genetic engineering.Physicists are perfectly happy to discuss things that don't exist if the mathematical abstraction allows for degeneration into something that does exist, or an observable phenomenon. We talk about multiverses, wave functions and probability distributions, and even anthropomorphise electrons with equanimity. Electrical and radio engineering is largely about imaginary numbers. Philosophers are people who don't understand science.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 10/02/2022 15:01:07If there is no mindful/conscious entity in the universe, then there's no way to verify if an assertion/belief about a fact is true or false, So a logic gate is a conscious entity? The crosscoupled NAND debouncer even makes a firm decision from indistinct data.This certainly spits in the eye of human vanity - every living thing makes decisions!