Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 10:14 am
Veritas Aequitas wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 9:40 am
Belinda wrote: ↑Fri May 01, 2020 9:11 am
Yes, those plus obedience to authority including the authority of priests, peddlers, PR specialists, old fashioned royalty and aristocrats, popular public figures such as actors some of whom have turned into politicians, and popular war lords.
Some individuals have better judgement and know more than other individuals. Empirical knowledge, reasoned judgement, and values are inseparable. Human freedom of choice is perhaps not important to you as a supreme value. However if it is, then good men work towards every man being able to maximise his choices.
Good judgments need the faculty of reason, i.e. fine reasoning not crude reasoning.
But good judgments are in a way useless if they cannot be converted into actions.
Some people can give very good and sound advice but they cannot put those into practice themselves.
Thus the more critical point is the necessary
neural mechanisms to effectively connect and convert sound judgments into virtuous actions.
This is why wisdom and philosophy [ability to apply good judgments into practice] i.e. 'walk the talk'.
So how do we build effective neural mechanisms to translate good judgment into its corresponding virtuous actions. Here Buddhism's 4NT and 8FP is most appropriate and most effective if we incorporate the neurosciences.
So you know what constitutes 'good judgement' and 'virtuous actions'? And those aren't matters of belief or opinion? Perhaps they're examples of relatively objective things - products of intersubjective consensus? Collectively thinking something is so actually makes it so?
I have already argued and presented to you what is the objective highest good and therefrom a hierarchy of various degrees of 'good' i.e. virtues.
Yes, they are relative objective moral oughts verified from empirical and philosophical reasonings, i.e. products of intersubjective consensus.
Note, there are two types of judgment, i.e. conscious deliberate and unconscious spontaneous.
A malignant psychopath can consciously deliberate act out whatever is labeled as virtuous, that is not morality but leveraged by evil.
Morality-proper is more concern with unconscious spontaneous than conscious deliberate judgments leveraged on the inherent moral faculty within the brain.
These spontaneous unconscious good judgments are based on the effective neural connections that enable the resultant actions to be virtuous.
These effective neural connections has to be developed and maintained via wisdom and regular practices [exceptions are those born with it]. The analogy is the tennis champion who played spontaneously and winning in his games.
If you have read Hume's
Treatise and
Enquiry, you would have noted Hume is talking about the same thing I have presented above [except the neural points].
Hume 'is/ought' limitation is confined to
absolute-moral-objectives like those from the theists and the ontological ones you are imagining.
In his books, Hume in a way recognized
relative-moral-objectives within society, humanity and the human species.