3 ms·

Shoot, and here I am with my immediate reaction to "What is the meaning of life?" as "To do right by my fellow man". I guess I'll never be one of the cool kids

Shoot, and here I am with my immediate reaction to "What is the meaning of life?" as "To do right by my fellow man". I guess I'll never be one of the cool kids who can honestly answer this question with a deafening silence. Oh, well. I'd rather be happy doing right by my fellow man because that's the point of it all than sitting in a corner ruminating on whether my intuition is misguided.

robertonoa 2y ago
Something to consider: subjective good isn't objectively good, and objectively good things are hard to locate.
- fellowniusmonk 2y ago
  Something to consider. No alternatives actually propose an objective good either. And why does it matter anyway? I'm a moral realist. Everyone seems to advocate that some things are properly basic, I think morality is one of those things.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  Can't argue against the first point, that distinction is probably true. But contra "hard to locate": Take vision. Suppose you see a cat. Your vision is subjective in a sense... but there's a pretty strong correlation to there actually being a cat. In fact, all of our senses work like that. So it would be surprising if this other felt sense isn't also usually, approximately, but correctly, homing in on objective good. Are there times when what we perceive to be true really is rarely the actual truth? Absolutely -- in deeply abstracted thinking, and over highly complex domains. That seems to me to be more of an argument against trusting the complicated chains of logic that lead one to deny the evidence of their moral senses, though. I've made enough "trivial" mistakes in math class that led to a totally wrong conclusion to be skeptical, and that was back when I could check the right answer with Wolfram|Alpha. (My own deeply abstracted thinking suggests that your moral intuition homes in on objective good similarly to how the processes of markets home in on Pareto efficiency. See how silly that sounds? And yet I can't shake it. It's like making up a conspiracy theory to explain why water is wet!)
scubbo 2y ago
While I wholly agree with your prioritization - in fairness it is not impossible to take pragmatic helpful actions _while also_ ruminating on whether they are philosophically watertight.

robertonoa 2y ago

Something to consider: subjective good isn't objectively good, and objectively good things are hard to locate.

fellowniusmonk 2y ago
Something to consider. No alternatives actually propose an objective good either. And why does it matter anyway? I'm a moral realist. Everyone seems to advocate that some things are properly basic, I think morality is one of those things.
hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
Can't argue against the first point, that distinction is probably true. But contra "hard to locate": Take vision. Suppose you see a cat. Your vision is subjective in a sense... but there's a pretty strong correlation to there actually being a cat. In fact, all of our senses work like that. So it would be surprising if this other felt sense isn't also usually, approximately, but correctly, homing in on objective good. Are there times when what we perceive to be true really is rarely the actual truth? Absolutely -- in deeply abstracted thinking, and over highly complex domains. That seems to me to be more of an argument against trusting the complicated chains of logic that lead one to deny the evidence of their moral senses, though. I've made enough "trivial" mistakes in math class that led to a totally wrong conclusion to be skeptical, and that was back when I could check the right answer with Wolfram|Alpha. (My own deeply abstracted thinking suggests that your moral intuition homes in on objective good similarly to how the processes of markets home in on Pareto efficiency. See how silly that sounds? And yet I can't shake it. It's like making up a conspiracy theory to explain why water is wet!)

scubbo 2y ago

While I wholly agree with your prioritization - in fairness it is not impossible to take pragmatic helpful actions _while also_ ruminating on whether they are philosophically watertight.