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Okay, say a philosopher makes an argument for why we should switch to socialism, or become vegans. These arguments would go something like: "Socialism is good

Okay, say a philosopher makes an argument for why we should switch to socialism, or become vegans. These arguments would go something like: "Socialism is good because it's a more equitable distribution of resources, which leads to greater happiness and a society with less poverty because xyz." "Veganism is good because it reduces the harm done to animals and the harm done to humans working in the meat industry, who have far increased rates of PTSD compared to the general population." These arguments will only convince you if (i) you think an equitable distribution of resources is better (ii) less poverty is better (iii) xyz is a convincing reason to think there would be less poverty (iv) harm to animals should be reduced (v) harm to humans should be reduced (vi) incidence of PTSD should be reduced. These philosophers do not say there is some law of the universe which mandates that less poverty is better, or that PTSD is bad. The reasons why you should think those things, they would say, are second-order reasons. There may be some other paper arguing why PTSD in society is a net negative. That paper would ultimately read something like "icreased PTSD rates lead to increased rate of suicide/lower economic efficiency/harm to other humans". There is no single argument why harming other humans is wrong, only axioms that we would take as our priors, just as we take it that "A != !A". They just seem right, and you don't have to subscribe to them yourself. Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted". It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions even given those axioms. Again, you don't have to share the axioms, but if you do, a logical argument can be produced from them, one which it would be to your embarrassment to ignore without any refutation, still assuming that you hold the axioms yourself. Again, you need not do so. Similarly, the advice from a physicist about the heat tolerance of the hull of your rocket ship would need to balance both economic and other interests. If you don't care about going into debt, you can sey hell to the economic arguments, and use the best materials possible. If you don't even care about your ship launching, you can say hell to the physical arguments about tensile strength. What I'm trying to convince you of is that philosophy is about as useful as any other field of inquiry in the sense that it attempts to argue from axioms most people hold already (therefore it is not a niche field) and it produces conclusions that such people can use in making choices day to day (therefore it is not a useless field). I think that no matter what particular axioms you hold, there is some philosophy which argues from those axioms out there somewhere. You yourself make philosophy. I'm not producing an argument from authority here. Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct?

stale2002 4y ago
> Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted". Ah, here is the disconnect, and where you would be wrong. What you are describing is called moral anti-realism. And yes, if all a philosopher is doing, is saying "given a set of unjustified axioms, that we are assuming, this is what follows" then I have no problem with this line of thinking. The problem that I have, is that the majority of philosophical thought these days, is for moral realism. They don't just have axioms. Instead, they think the universe itself proves their axioms to be true, and if you disagree with their axiom, you are just as much of a science denier as if you questioned a different expert in a different field. If only philosophers just admitted that they just had axioms like everyone else. > It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions Sure. As I stated in part of one of my posts, if we just want to say that philosophy is a useful way of thinking, then that's fine. Just don't say it is the same as the universe proving your axioms true. > Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct? It's called moral realism. Most philosophers are moral realists these days. They literally believe that their moral axioms are true, in a epistemological sense. (Veganism is just an example of one such moral statement that many make) You can pick any famous moral realist, and that will be mostly the case for them.
- claudiawerner 4y ago
  I had a feeling you'd bring up moral realism, and you're somewhat correct; it's not a necessary feature of moral realism, however, and most philosophers arguing for moral realism have stronger arguments than "that's just the way it is", which usually appeal to our intuitions about other non-moral facts, such as "this chair exists" or "I have two hands". It's up to you whether those arguments are successful, but it doesn't do anyone favours to dismiss them out of hand as you are doing. If they were so patently ridiculous, I doubt many philosophers would believe them. If they make sense by relying on our intuitions about other facts of the universe, I can see why many philosophers believe them. If you have a solid argument aganist moral realism, I'd like to hear it, even though I'm familiar with most of the arguments for moral anti-realism, and I generally sit on the anti-realist side of the fence these days. But it does yourself a disservice to say that all such arguments are circular and logically invalid. I quite like this argument from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral realism: "In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do. But they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims."

stale2002 4y ago

> Unlike religion, all philosophers can say is "it would be advantageous to generally valued goals X,Y,Z that we take these axioms for granted". Ah, here is the disconnect, and where you would be wrong. What you are describing is called moral anti-realism. And yes, if all a philosopher is doing, is saying "given a set of unjustified axioms, that we are assuming, this is what follows" then I have no problem with this line of thinking. The problem that I have, is that the majority of philosophical thought these days, is for moral realism. They don't just have axioms. Instead, they think the universe itself proves their axioms to be true, and if you disagree with their axiom, you are just as much of a science denier as if you questioned a different expert in a different field. If only philosophers just admitted that they just had axioms like everyone else. > It turns out that enough people share these axioms for this philosophical work to be useful for navigating difficult questions Sure. As I stated in part of one of my posts, if we just want to say that philosophy is a useful way of thinking, then that's fine. Just don't say it is the same as the universe proving your axioms true. > Can you cite a philosopher arguing that the universe itself mandates that veganism is correct? It's called moral realism. Most philosophers are moral realists these days. They literally believe that their moral axioms are true, in a epistemological sense. (Veganism is just an example of one such moral statement that many make) You can pick any famous moral realist, and that will be mostly the case for them.

claudiawerner 4y ago
I had a feeling you'd bring up moral realism, and you're somewhat correct; it's not a necessary feature of moral realism, however, and most philosophers arguing for moral realism have stronger arguments than "that's just the way it is", which usually appeal to our intuitions about other non-moral facts, such as "this chair exists" or "I have two hands". It's up to you whether those arguments are successful, but it doesn't do anyone favours to dismiss them out of hand as you are doing. If they were so patently ridiculous, I doubt many philosophers would believe them. If they make sense by relying on our intuitions about other facts of the universe, I can see why many philosophers believe them. If you have a solid argument aganist moral realism, I'd like to hear it, even though I'm familiar with most of the arguments for moral anti-realism, and I generally sit on the anti-realist side of the fence these days. But it does yourself a disservice to say that all such arguments are circular and logically invalid. I quite like this argument from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on moral realism: "In light of this concern, it is worth noting that the challenge posed here for our moral claims actually plagues a huge range of other claims we take ourselves to be justified in making. For instance, just as no collection of nonmoral premises will alone entail a moral conclusion, no collection of nonpsychological premises will alone entail a psychological conclusion, and no collection of nonbiological premises will alone entail a biological conclusion. In each case the premises will entail the conclusions only if, at least surreptitiously, psychological or biological premises, respectively, are introduced. Yet no one supposes that this means we can never justify claims concerning psychology or biology. That there are these analogues of course does not establish that we are, in fact, justified in making the moral claims we do. But they do show that granting the inferential gap between nonmoral claims and moral claims does not establish that we can have no evidence for the moral claims."