MikeNovack wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2026 3:12 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 20, 2026 12:32 am
No. Because they never say. They keep it all so vague, and never try to legitimize a single ethic. They're tremendous generators of jargon, but not much good at grounding any of it, apparently.
It is not unreasonable for you to think that a set of postulates used to generate the set of ethical or moral "theorems" (judgements if ethical, choices of action if moral) must themselves be ethically or morally justified.
Of course they must. If not, they're just arbitrary. The only way a rational person should accept a moral claim is if it's rational, and provides reasonable justification.
Neitzsche had plenty to say about the dangers of accepting one's "ethics" from others, without having a basis for them. Of course, he was an Atheist, so he thought that what was true of, say, Humanist ethics would also prove true of all "Judeo-Christian" (as he called them) ethics.
Of course, Nietzsche knows better now.
But I think his critique has to be take seriously, at least by anybody who believes that there's no God. For if there's no God, as Nietzsche well understood, then neither is any morality anything more than an attempt by some group of the weak to exercise power over or prevention against the strong. And Nietzsche well understood that he who saw through that ruse first would be at a great advantage...a true
ubermensch, an "overman," a superior man, within that worldview.
In other words, you cannot conceive they could possibly work to result in the correct set of choices of action otherwise.
Not quite: I merely point out that absent legitimation, any ethic is unable to indicate to us what the morally "correct set of choices of action" would ever be. For how would we know that what they were telling us was right, since they can't even tell us WHY we should believe what they say, or how they came to "know" it, when we did not?
You are being reasonable, but wrong. I want you to think about the problem in reverse. Suppose there were something true (had a very high probability of being true) about a correct moral choice and false for the wrong choice in that situation. Suppose there were a number of such somethings. Then it could be proposed that these things could be used to determine "is A or B the moral choice of action in this situation?". Even if I could not tell you, don't know, what is the moral basis of these things.
In this hypothetical, you've merely skipped the problem. You've declared the possibilty of their being a "correct moral choice," with a "high probability of being true." But you haven't said what this sort of moral choice would be, nor have you said how we calculate this "probability" for it to be...what's the word? "True." As if there actually is an objective moral truth.
So essentially, as a secularist, you're asking us to pretend to imagine a scenario that secularism tells us never happens, and never could. For secularism holds that there is NO objective morality, no moral "truth," no calculator of "probabilties" of truth, and no "correct" moral choices. There are only temporary, subjective options, none of which can ever be ranked as more moral than any other.
Unless you've smuggled in some criteria of "correctness" and "probability," along with the tacit assumption of the existence of "moral truth," we can't even do what you ask. So let me ask you: where do you get these things? And from where do you expect us to be obligated to take them?
If this concept seems impossible, I can give an example of working in practice for the computer programs able to play go/weiqi/baduk at such a high level. In other words the KEY was in discovering something that would be true if next move X were better than next move Y (this something having nothing to do with knowing why X was a better move than Y). Yes the strongest current programs are also using AI, but that is to narrow down the list of candidates, not for the final decision which of X, Y, Z, etc. is best.
Look at the red words you employed. They're all value-presupposing terms. But there are no objective values in secularism, and the values proposed by Humanism are not asserted as objective...or if they ever are, only arbitrarily, not with any justification supplied.
This would ask us to assume we already know what "better," "true" and "best" are, in application to this problem. But do we? You say we don't have to know -- but then, we have no way of knowing anything about the goals or results. So we would not be able to detect what was "better" or "worse" in any "solution" we got, and we wouldn't able to say anything about what it "solved" either. Because all of that is only tacitly assumed above. No legitimative method or proof of correctness is offered.
Returning to morality. Suppose when we examined moral choices we discovered that the right choice always satisfied the condition of justice and the wrong choice violated that.
Well, today, practically nobody agrees on what "justice" is. And one has no idea what the "conditions of justice" would ever be. So how on earth would we be able to "discover" or be "satisfied" we'd found the "just" choice? What are our criteria? And how is my, your, or anybody else's conception of "justice" certified as the correct or "wrong"?
Should I have to explain WHY that is so before using "does the choice satisfy justice" to make a moral choice.
Yes. But before you do, you should justify your conception of "justice." Then you're going to have to convince the skeptics, chief among whom are going to be secularists and Humanists with a different view of the right goal from you, that what you're advocating is objectively "a moral choice." But secularisms insist on morality being merely subjective: so you're going to be reduced to saying something like,
"My subjective sense of justice requires that we make choice X, though I can't say that my conception of justice is better than yours, and I have no reason for holding to it, other than my feelings, and ultimately, there's no such thing as an actual moral choice." And you're going to have to suppose that that's all they're going to ask, before they fall in line and say, "Righty ho!"
So you've really got your work cut out for you. Good luck, if you ever try that moral project.
