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