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I was hesitant to use the phrase “moral objectivism” because what I’m talking about is more moral pragmatism where a goal is defined and good or bad is objectiv
by 3grdlurker 5y ago
I was hesitant to use the phrase “moral objectivism” because what I’m talking about is more moral pragmatism where a goal is defined and good or bad is objectively measured against that goal. What I’ve learned from experience is that where a goal is defined, there is very rarely any confusion about what is a good/bad action. Of course as applied to society where multiple cultures and large nation-stayes exist, we’ll have disagreements about what the goal of cooperation is, but that seems more to me a discussion about politics and conflict instead of ethics itself.
As an example: if we agree that the goal of our species is to live for as long as possible and we look specifically at the threat of climate change, then based on that goal, we could immediately identify whether any given economic activity is good or bad based on its effects on the environment, which would be based on empirical data.
Some people may deny the truthfulness of the data (which then creates “climate change deniers”), but at the core of the people who disagree isn’t so much about doubting the facts, but really, they just disagree that the goal of our species is to survive for as long as possible, and it’s likely that they believe that our goal is to use up as much of the earth as possible within every single person’s lifetime.
- n4r9 5y ago> a goal is defined and good or bad is objectively measured against that goal This seems like standard rational empiricism? Employing reason and observation to benchmark things against predefined values. The difficulty of course is in determining those values in the first place.
- okaram 5y agoThis is close to utilitarian ethics. The problem is that, taken to the extreme, it is easy to yield obviously wrong moral decisions. For example, if we define 'survive as long as possible' as having 1+ humans alive, we might decide we should kill 1/2 of the population (Thanos did nothing wrong).
- dTal 5y agoBut that's not obviously wrong, if the alternative really is human extinction with 100% probability. The true difficulty with utilitarianism is properly defining the metric to be optimized.