Egregoros

@a@fedi.layer02.net it's not absurd i see it a lot, people apply it to all sorts of things like "actually we can live our lives however we want because truth is unknowable and morality doesn't exist so i can do whatever" (people making bad decisions in life) and "actually we can't solve social problems because truth is unknowable and morality doesn't exist so we should just do whatever is pleasant to the masses" (friend sent me a paper about this) and all the way to "actually we can't enforce morality because truth is unknowable and morality doesn't exist so we should let this immoral thing be a thing" (postmodernism justifying fascism/oppressive regimes, cultural violence for instance, do i need to come up with more examples)

@shibao maybe this is just the classical moral objectivist vs relativist argument but if you're a relativist the idea that morals are objective is already something you disagree with, and the idea that morals have a truth value is likewise inconsistent

being a relativist doesn't justify immoral actions, it just attributes them to something other than the universe. morals are ideals that require some kind of application to be effective. the very fact that people *can* disagree on what is moral is enough to disprove the idea that they are universal (if they were truly universal they would be self-evident and not require agreement)

this isn't even a marxist thing imo, it's just the realization that you aren't the universe (because it's pretty curious how the objective moral truth just so happens to be the thing i agree with)

@a@fedi.layer02.net philosophy has hundreds of years of writing by people much more eloquent than i ever will be, if you can't find a philosophy student to talk with then maybe you can ask ai to steelman the opposing argument and challenge you. i don't really want to get into this so i get to say my favorite thing, "read theory", but

if you're a relativist the idea that morals are objective is already something you disagree with

yes i am not a moral relativist

for instance i'm pretty sure ai could come up with

the very fact that people can disagree on what the value of 2 is enough to disprove the idea that the number 2 is universal

but in immediate time for you

it's just the realization that you aren't the universe

this isn't a philosophical argument but it could be if you developed it more perhaps

@shibao i was making a social media post not a formal philosophical argument but okay 😇

btw "2" is a symbol that can represent anything linguistically, and the concepts that it represents doesn't have a truth value either (unless you count "truthiness" coercion in dynamic languages, where 0 is "false"). this is likewise not objective because "2" has to be contextualized like any other symbol in a processing context. trinitarian christians might say "three is one" and take that to be a profound universal truth, but even if you agree in-context, you might disagree arithmetically. try making that statement in a programming language and you get "false".

mostly the thing i am commenting on is the idealism and also the strange coincidence that the universal ideal just so happens to align with whoever is stating it. it's not me saying this, it's the universe which is objectively true and agrees with me and is my friend. i can't take responsibility for any of my beliefs or statements because i am only describing a universal truth. i'm just a messenger, i don't make the rules, etc.

@a@fedi.layer02.net i probably should've said ontological 2 because that's when the philosophical argument applies and completely disregarding the cultural idea of 2, which is a practical concern. did you really think i was making an argument that the concept of 2 was a universal social constant?

ethical relativism says that ethics literally works differently for different people and cultures, so that what is ethical for you isn't ethical to me and vice versa. imo the universe already has many truths, so i don't think the concept of the universe applying morality in the same way for all people is farfetched from for instance applying physics in the same way for all people (hurr durr relativity but if you were going to same velocity in the same place then you will experience the same time dilation, etc).

i don't think the universe is "agreeing with me" when i go from a high energy system to a lower energy system, or vice versa, ethics is much deeper than whether is something right or wrong, if it was then you'd be right that such a field would only be useful for ego massaging. it's the difference between a technical study of something and a safety check, ethics is not just handbook of speed limits, but a whole dimension of study where we can use arguments to build large thought structures to form a civilization called moral philosophy

@shibao 2 doesn't exist ontologically until you describe it. morals are much the same. if there were no persons in the universe then what morals exist? you introduce moral actors by ascribing moral properties to them, which require a context to be qualified

> i don't think the concept of the universe applying morality in the same way for all people is farfetched

what does the universe say morally about homosexuality or putting ice cream in your back pocket? who speaks for the universe?

i mean, when you fall off a cliff, you can reason about physics or gravity up until the point that you die. what does moral reasoning do in a universal sense? "civilization"? the morals of that civilization depend on the civilization's values. one civilization ends, another begins, there need not be moral continuity between the two

@a@fedi.layer02.net

2 doesn't exist ontologically until you describe it

this is a claim that doesn't have any proof or reasoning behind it. an argument for why this is false goes as follows, if 2 doesn't exist ontologically, then why does math work for things we haven't seen yet? this would imply that 2 exists ontologically (as literally baked into the structure of reality). and also, animals can recognize the concept of two things as opposed to one thing, even though they do not have a word or concept for it.

if there were no persons in the universe then what morals exist?

this is similar to saying if there is no matter in the universe (or for the sake of argument, things that can receive effects from the universe), does physics (aka how the universe still works) still exist?

what does moral reasoning do in a universal sense?

i'm not eve saying whether or not it does anything universally (just that it is very useful for us), but that it exists like physics or numbers transcend our words or descriptions or even recognition of it

the morals of that civilization depend on the civilization's values

practically, sure, but what I am talking about is philisophically which needs arguments like the ones i provided for 2 above to be more than just a claim with no proof or logic or structure. you can have your beliefs but do not confuse it with philosophy

@shibao well how do you measure moral truth values? any moral calculus depends on the values assigned. like, if your concept is only "one" and "many" then no, 2 doesn't exist until we reify 2. just like we reified 0

i think you are quoting the wrong bits of what i said because the operative part was the assignment of moral properties and values, not the rhetorical introduction via base case

i'm still waiting to hear about what the universal moral truth value is for homosexuality or for putting ice cream in your back pocket btw. which instrument would you use to determine this

@a@fedi.layer02.net > any moral calculus depends on the values assigned
if we replace 3 with 2 on our papers, math would still work, so I'm assuming you are saying we could replace the concept of 2 with the concept of 3, in which math would quickly run into contradictions

for instance, assume a successor function S that basically just goes to the next item, so S(1) = 2 and S(2) = 3 (normally). Then, we assume that S(1) = 3 and S(3) = 2. Then for all natural numbers we assume they are well ordered, so if a < b, then S(a) < S(b). but then if 1 < 3, then S(1) < S(3), and 3 < 2, and then we've broken transitivity, thus you can't have a scale and you literally can't have calculus.

there is no one "objective moral truth" that you're thinking of that extends from recognizing that objective moral truth exists. but for instance, in kantian ethics, one argues that things are objectively moral if they follow from duties or obligations, so they would say something like if being homosexual does not violate the duties, rights or obligations of another, then it is not morally wrong. but you can rinse and repeat for all other ethical systems that are built off of objective morality, just saying objective morality does not mean you have to belief in kantian ethics, or that kantian ethics is still not functional (or at least as far as it goes, these things continue forever since people bring new arguments on age old questions even today and they need to be addressed and whatnot), and even if they are not, you can still engage with them like engaging in mathematics in universes where items are swapped to see where it goes like the one above, and usually you can find moral arguments that become so completely absurd that it blatantly contradicts itself or something if it's really out of wack. but what you believe is different from literally just doing the philosophy. but to deny someone's belief on the basis of philosophy requires actually knowing the philosophy in the first place and not refusing to address it with "this is just a social media post and not a philosophical argument". i'm not sure i even consider myself a kantian, ethically tbh