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Here is my take: All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the worl
by Drakim 6y ago
Here is my take:
All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality.
It might very well be that what we take in from our surroundings and environment isn't an "objective reality", but an incredibly twisted and mangled version which is has more falsehoods, inaccuracies and errors, than any truths. To say that the sky is blue is an incredibly "human" observation, which relies on our eyes having divided the light spectrum into arbitrary ranges we call colors. There is no grounding to distinct colors, other than what our eyes and brain arbitrarily imposes to make sense of what it's taking in. It's a clever, but arbitrary, way to look at the light spectrum.
But we do the best with what we have, there is no point in wallowing in pity, we simply work with the tools we are given. Now, even if we cannot justify it, it does appear to us that murder is morally wrong. We are repulsed by it, we wish to avoid it, we want to minimize it, we label those who do it as being flawed and broken, and we have all sorts of theories and ideas about how murder doesn't fit in with how human life operates.
Even though I cannot point you to any objective anchoring as to why murder is wrong, I can neither point you to any objective anchoring for anything. I cannot prove that what I see, touch, feel, smell and hear is really there, nor that what I am observing is in any way accurate. Even the most basic mathematical facts are suspect, if you can't verify the mental faculties behind it.
So why reject the moral facts I cannot verify, but accept the observable, evidential, mathematical facts that I cannot verify? Who gets to choose which ones gets a pass? I think murder is wrong for the same reason I think the sky is blue: because that's what my senses, body and mind tells me.
- lhorie 6y agoConsider that even murder isn't universally considered bad. Examples include wars, self defense, proponents of the death penalty, the sentinelese, etc. Debates can get particularly heated when one gets into things like abortion and ethical dilemmas. As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it is possible for a set of axioms to be internally consistent (e.g. basic algebra), yet we can construct a meta set of axioms to demonstrate that it is impossible to mathematically prove every truth therein.
- Drakim 6y agoTrue enough, but even so, in these examples you mentioned, war, self defense, death penalty, people struggle a lot with being mentally harmed by taking lives. I read somewhere that Nazi Germany moved to gassing those they persecuted rather than simply killing them by firing squad because the firing squads couldn't handle it day in and day out. The majority of mankind abhors murder, and has to invent elaborate methods and rules to avoid facing the brute reality of it, even when they say that it's good. My point is just that to me, and my society as a whole, murder is seen as something bad, as a simple and obvious fact, a safe assumption. If somebody wants to tell me that assumption is wrong and should be removed, I want to see what sort of stuff their assumptions are built out of to justify such confidence.
- lhorie 6y agoI think there are both nature and nurture aspects to why in general we dislike the thought of killing our own kind. Physiologically we have brain mechanisms that activate when we see a stimulus to another person (yawning and phantom limb experiments being well known examples). Hypothetically if we had evolved from mantises instead of primates, we might be physiologically conditioned to think eating our sexual partners was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if our moral framework in that case lead to utterances such as "how dare you not sacrifice your life for your children!" On the nurture side, the sentinelese are perfectly fine with killing foreigners violently on sight. There are also records in other tribal cultures of the belief that cannibalism was a way to inherit someone's desirable traits. So clearly culture plays a role as well.
- Drakim 6y agoYup, agreed. Likewise, concepts such as the taste of sweet, salt, sour; colors such as red, blue and yellow; behaviors such as aggressive, calm, afraid; emotions such as happy, angry, sad; evaluations such as beautiful, ugly, plain; All of these are from nature and nurture, they don't exist as mathematical laws or any sort of foundational aspect of how the universe works. It's all just subjective and arbitrary inventions we have created to categorize and make sense of what we observe. Yet they are all immensely important to us! Even though they don't have objective grounding. We base our entire societies, our ways of life, our ways of thinking, around these incredibly non-justified categories of things. Yet, there is a whole lot of people who seem to want to exclude morality from this box. It has to be thrown out, because it's not objective, not justified, not "real". But in contrast to what exactly?
- dgreensp 6y agoI agree. Your point that "assumptions hang in thin air" removes the need for the universe to supply us with axioms, including moral axioms, which is an idea the author leans on heavily. We have many thoughts and ideas about life. For example, a person might think, "The ideal life is infinitely long and involves no pain." This probably comes from a logical part of the mind, similar to where statements like "two plus two equals four" are validated and appreciated, but that doesn't mean it's equally objective. We are animals, and staying alive and avoiding pain are strong drives.