4 ms·
You can square it with some basic philosophy. Hume's Guillotine - you can't derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Munchhausen Trilemma - you can o
by tunesmith 6y ago
You can square it with some basic philosophy. Hume's Guillotine - you can't derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Munchhausen Trilemma - you can only answer "why" with circular reasoning, infinite regress, or axioms - axioms being the only reasonable option of the three.
Throw in some other logic, and you end up with the conclusion that the world can still be logical, but that many normative conclusions (which is what the world runs on) depend on moral axioms that differ from person to person.
So there's a distinction between people that reason correctly from their moral axioms, and people who don't. And among the ones who don't, there's a distinction between those that just make a mistake, and the ones that are deliberately presenting their arguments in bad faith. But even the latter have their own internal conclusions that are honest attempts at rational derivations from their internal values.
- whatshisface 6y agoPeople who claim to reason from moral axioms are usually hypocritical in special cases, or evil in special cases. If you observe the behavior of someone who believes in moral axioms, you will find that they will go back and change their axioms (at best) or ignore them, when they lead to a conclusion that goes against their natural moral intuitions. Otherwise (I have never seen someone do this, but I guess it's possible) they would be "evil in special cases," going against their conscience and probably doing something bad, just because they made a mistake in choosing their moral axioms long before the special case arose. It's very common in philosophy (and the sciences, too) to find that the axioms lead to the wrong answer, and as a result say "oops, they must be wrong," and pick different axioms. In that case, though, the flow of epistimophlogiston is going from empiricism back to axioms, not from axioms to conclusions.
- tunesmith 6y agoOn the other hand... that's exactly what it means to be human, and is not the flaw that it is often made out to be in the literature. We as people both forward-chain and backward-chain. If I have principles that are important to me, I might reason forward from them to plan or conclude. And then if I discover an undesirable outcome, then that means I've learned something about myself, and then I can reason backwards to adjust what my principle actually is, and reason forward from that adjustment. There's nothing morally wrong with learning and evolving. It doesn't by definition mean we're inconsistent.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]