this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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My dude, Kant refuted that over two centuries ago. There's no need to invoke a deity or require pure empiricism for morality. Absolute moral rules can be discovered through logical deduction.
Can you elaborate?
I don't believe that's possible unless you take an axiomatic approach which would obviously be a moral relativist approach since we can just disagree on the choice of axioms themselves and prevent any deduction.
How do you overcome the is-ought problem?
the regress problem states that all human knowledge is axiomatic. this is a big ol nothing-burger of a refutation, it is true for literally every single possible proposition.
asking him to overcome this problem is so fucking far outside the scope of what you’re arguing about as to be ridiculous, you look silly.
Okay so it's clear you understand why I brought it up and that it's true.
I don't know why the rest of the comment is phrased so angrily but if you're just saying I'm right I don't know how to respond to it lol.
I wasn't asking him to overcome it, I was astonished he would claim he could overcome it because it's as obviously true as we both claim.
Not sure why I look silly if you keep telling me how absolutely right I am in all contexts lol
Not really. Best practices based on a set of goals and priorities can be discovered logically. The sticking point is that people can have very wildly different goals and priorities, and even small changes to that starting point can cause a huge difference in the resulting best practices.
Goals and priorities might differ a lot between an ant and a human but not so much between two humans. At least not enough to not get at least a few rules for behavior.
Just because its easy to get a bunch of humans to agree say murder is wrong, doesn't mean you can call that objective.
The reason humans and ants differ so much in morality is because of the difference in the subjective experience of being a person versus being an ant.
If morality is subjective, you'd expect creatures with similar subjective experiences to agree with each other.
You'd expect one subjective blob of rules to conform to human biology/sociology and a separate blob of subjective rules to apply to antkind with no real way to interface between the two.
and you base that expectation on what?
hopes and dreams?
this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know ants and humans experience different subjective experiences, you just strongly suspect it. knowing =/= suspecting. which is why you follow this illogic down to an incorrect conclusion of your “expectation.”
the greatest challenge of our age is dispelling the victorian myth that knowledge of the real world is untouchable to us. the distinction between you and other does exist, but we are not locked out of the world. we can deduce real facts about things outside our perception.
I'm sorry, what?
Sure, in the same way I have no knowledge of anything except "I think therefore I am".
If you apply this level of skepticism it's impossible to move beyind solipsism.
You're free to apply that standard, I wouldn't be able to prove knowledge beyond it and then all conversation stops here.
If you'll at least grant me a mutual belief in the external world so we can probe it and collect empirical data we can "pretend" is knowledge then we can build up a more interesting philosophy beyond "I don't believe anything exists at all but me".
No, I follow it because out of utility I'd like a more useful philosophy than solipsism.
What? That's literally what you just argued? Now you're trying to dispel it?
Why should I not respond "this is predicated on a false assumption. you don’t know real facts outside your perception you just strongly suspect it."?
You just flipped your argument around 180 degrees?