Skepdick wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:12 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:00 pm
Totally right. Without God actually revealing something to us, we'd all have to be moral agnostics.
We might "think" certain things might, in some unclear sense, "seem better," but we'd never know if our feelings were grounded in any facts.
You have no way of knowing who revealed it to you.
You might think so. And it's quite true, as Bob Dylan so poignantly wrote, that "You're Gonna Have to Serve Somebody." There are good and bad reasons for choosing the voice you listen to. One must be prudent, to be sure.
However, one option is very bad from all sides: that is, the option of deluding oneself that one is self-sufficient, and can get by without choosing any "team". For this much is certain: we did not bring ourselves into this world, and will not have any say about whether or not we go out of it, and when. In the meanwhile, we have precious little say over the circumstances in the middle, too. Whatever is going on here, it is not us, the solipsistic individual, who is determining what is going on...and what it all means, if anything.
We are not gods. We are not, ourselves, independent determiners of "the Good." We are nowhere near that big. No sane person would think we are, which is yet another reason why, as you point out, moral subjectivism is such an absurdity.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:00 pm
In short, they'd be nothing
but feelings.
Feelings are enough for a survival instinct.
That may be. But they are not enough to tell us whether that "instinct" is moral. It could easily be selfish only. And it certainly gives us no warrant for knowing that the survival of any other particular individual is of concern to us.
Any strategy that keeps you from becoming extinct is an "advantage". Different strategies work - the ones that don't are self-correcting.
The ones that do are self-maximising.
Perhaps so: but none of this has to do with the moral. It only has to do with survival, and of one's own in particular.
Who's asserting that "everybody died" ?
I wrote "everybody die
s," not "everybody die
d."
The mortality rate in the human race is 100%, so far. Everybody dies.
Given some states of nature contain observers and some states of nature don't your very existence suggests you should prefer the former over the latter,
This isn't at all obvious. Why should one not prefer a situation with few or only one "survivor," especially if that means more cheese for everybody? Rather, survival of the fittest suggests it's actually good that many die, and a few triumph.
Well, until they become the weak, which they inevitably do, and then they are the ones to die -- Devil take the hindmost.
Nature happens to create life, and then kill it.
Nature could've skipped all that effort and just be unfavourable to any and all life-forms.
If that's true, then the fact that any survive at all is merely contingent...certainly not an issue of moral judgment. Nature doesn't enter into questions of "good" and "bad" all by itself.
In fact, this "nature," left to its own devices, will inevitably eventually wipe all life off this planet, then the Sun itself will burn out...and in the final analysis, the entire cosmos will be reduced to permanent equal distribution of energy through entropic Heat Death. And then the universe will be silent forever...
Where now is morality?
