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We are not discussing the correctness of their belief. We are discussing the usefulness of your tests to distinguish between moral, immoral, and amoral actions and behaviors.
Producing babies requires a lot of resources. Killing them would waste those resources, which could have been used elsewhere if they were not produced in the first place. So, refraining from killing them can be based on efficiency reason, which is a universal instrumental goal.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 16/03/2022 22:32:54We are not discussing the correctness of their belief. We are discussing the usefulness of your tests to distinguish between moral, immoral, and amoral actions and behaviors.and my tests do it perfectly, provided they are administered exactly as written.
My tests don't define good
mo·ral·i·tynounprinciples concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior.
My tests determine whether an action is moral. They are concrete, and don't offer or depend on a dictionary definition of morality, which is abstract.
The golden rule relies on the assumptions that everyone wants good things for themselves. It can be true, depending on how we define good. But if good is defined as what we want, then it becomes a circular logic.What someone thinks is good for them may not be the case for someone elses. That's why the golden rule may not work in some circumstances.
Alan's second test of morality needs to define love or dear. It needs to justify who should we love, and what distinguishes them from who shouldn't. Is it enough if it's just based on instinct or emotion?
You just redefined morality then.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 17/03/2022 22:45:05Alan's second test of morality needs to define love or dear. It needs to justify who should we love, and what distinguishes them from who shouldn't. Is it enough if it's just based on instinct or emotion? No, I leave it entirely to the prospective agent to decide. Remember it has to pass both tests for his action to be considered moral.
Under English law, your name is whatever your friends and family call you. That definition is good enough for the courts. So I leave it to each person to determine who is his nearest and dearest - no need to define near and dear as long as he can distinguish them from the rest of humanity - and ask whether he would be happy to do whatever it is, to them.
Not that any of this matters in practice. If you would be perfectly happy for me to kill you for no reason to do with you, and would be perfectly happy to kill your wife and children for any reason or none, I may still try to stop you killing anyone because I find the action offensive.
Your tests rely on the assumptions that everyone wants good things for themselves and their own love interests.
It is entirely up to me whether I find an action offensive. In general, it would be an action that failed one or both of my tests and could not, in my opinion, be justified by expediency. So I wouldn't go out of my way to kill anyone who wasn't a threat to life and limb, and I would happily kill anyone who was - that's expedient justification.
Quote from: hamdani yusuf on 20/03/2022 22:18:23Your tests rely on the assumptions that everyone wants good things for themselves and their own love interests. No implication of good things, only of harm.
It sounds like moral relativism.
Good here merely means the reverse of harm.
what is the reverse of a cut finger? What is the reverse of an insult? Absence of harm is demonstrable.