ChubbiestLamb6

ChubbiestLamb6 t1_j9ke3vv wrote

>optimal ethical determinations

Optimal how? The thing you seem to be missing is that you must choose a yardstick to assess any decision, action, situation, etc, as better or worse than another option. How can you possibly rank things as more or less optimal unless you've picked an attribute to care about? Your appeal to common values across cultures and species--even setting aside the inherent weakness of cherry-picking examples--hinges on a false equivalence between consensus and objectivity.

The fact that there is no objectively correct yardstick to use is the whole problem. It's not about, like, logistics, or the difficulty of accurately predicting outcomes in a complex system to be able to confidently pick the best actions, or anything like that. Those are all problems that come up after you've picked a yardstick.

I'm not saying your yardstick is a bad one, or an uncommon one. But you did pick it because you like it best for whatever reasons, compelling as they may be.

It seems like what you should be arguing for is something like an "Official Morality", not an objective one. I think failure to distinguish between the two is what leads to a lot of the friction in discussions like these. Reading your comment as an argument that it is possible to create a moral policy that is best suited to promote the things most people need and care about totally avoids the disagreements you're encountering. From everyone else's point of view, you missed the point of what "objective morality" means, and from your point of view, everyone else is bumbling around acting like it's impossible to determine if starving is preferable to being safe and well-fed due to some veil of philosophical technicality. But yhe real issue is that you're talking past each other.

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