Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2024 10:10 am
To be charitable, I would say 'doesn't notice contradiction when cognitive dissonance is at the door knocking.'
Proof, were any, needed that you are a much more charitable man than I am.
The root of all his moral arguments is that stupid "oughtness to breathe" thing. That's an inherent moral property of oughtness directly applied to the organism, so at the level of properties he's a moral naturalist and he always has been. It's impossible to have supervenience in this case, as, if he understood what the entailments of his own position are, he would realise he has collapsed the gap between the types of property before beginning the enquiry into how to bridge the damn gap.
Spot on. VA's 'moral theory' boils down to: 'A machine ought to perform according to its design specification. For example, a human ought to breathe.'
Everything he puts on top of this is camouflage intended to disguise a weakness, or diversions to make you look away from it.
Peter Holmes wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2024 1:50 pm
Here, the 'ought' has no moral significance - no sense of rightness or wrongness. So there is no is/ought problem - and VA's is not a moral theory. His so-called moral facts and moral objectivity are nothing of the sort. He just layers on a 'moral FSERC', as though that does the job.
But then, why ought a machine to perform according to its design specification? For example, why ought a human to breathe? VA: because otherwise it will die. So: why ought a human not to die?
And on and on.
Eventually that all boils down to a strong feeling he has that we are all playing his game and we are breaking the rules. The game is to sort things into categories.
