Angra Mainyu
Veteran Member
First, it's not only that he enjoys it. It's that he does it for fun, so that is the reason (not just a secondary reason).
Second, he deserves punishment, regardless of what he needs - what he needs is food, water, air, etc.
Third, your claim againt retributivism flies is just that: a claim that goes against the ordinary human moral faculty. As is the case when you question any human faculty, the burden is on you. It would be irrational to dismiss our faculties for no good reason - reasons we can only assess by means of some of our faculties, obviously.
Fourth and foremost, this misses the point entirely. The point of the example was not that he deserves punishment (though he does), but he behaves unethically. That is sufficient to show that Jarhyn's theory is false.
No, that is not a problem. The problem is with your qualifiers. But that the ordinary human moral faculty deems a behavior unethical is in fact sufficient evidence to conclude that it is so, just as is the case with other ordinary human faculties, and barring specific evidence to the contrary.
For that matter, if it seems blue to a normal human visual system under ordinary light conditions, that is pretty much sufficient evidence to reckon that it is blue. It's what rationally one should reckon, barring a lot of counter evidence. The same for the verdicts of other human faculties, in this case the moral faculty. It's you who has the burden of showing that his behavior is not unethical.
Again, your qualifiers only complicate matters. But the 'really' qualifier does not seem to add anything, but it's an intensifier. As for the others, I already addressed them.
Now, if you were correct and the ordinary human faculty were not enough to justify our moral assessments, then nothing would, and Jarhyn's theory would be unwarranted. The reason for that is that we do not have any tools for assessing whether a behavior is unethical or not other than the ordinary moral human faculty - our own, and that of other people -, aided of course by other faculties (e.g, to make intuitive probabilistic assessments about expected consequences of some behavior), but in the end, our moral faculty is the tool to make ethical assessments.
What about moral theories?
None is true. However, even if one were true, those theories can only be properly tested against the judgments of the human moral faculty (or against something already based on it), so even then, we would only be justified in believing them true if they pass the test when their predictions are tested vs. the human moral faculty.
Incidentally, something like the above holds for color too: we may have cameras and computers that can detect blue stuff, but we only have them because they have been calibrated using human color vision (or tools already based on it).
You seem to have lost track of the conversation. Again, I was showing that Jarhyn's theory was false. In order to test a theory, I just need to compare its predictions with some known facts. So, the extreme examples are pretty adequate.ruby sparks said:And in any case, you're too fond of the extreme example of causing harm for fun. It's trivially obvious that at some point on the spectrum of human behaviours, we could say something like, 'all normal, decent, intelligent humans would think this wrong'. So what? You're just operating at one extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, human morality is pretty relative and variegated.
So what, you say?
So, "'all normal, decent, intelligent humans would think this wrong'", but the theory I am debunking entails it is not morally wrong.
No, that is not true. It would be irrational to question one of our faculties without good evidence against it - evidence which, of course, we also assess on the basis of our human faculties!ruby sparks said:On the contrary, the claim that what you call the ordinary human moral sense is the proper tool to find moral truth is something for which the burden is on you.
We do not do that normally. For example, we do not claim people who say a traffic light was red that they have to show that the human visual system is a proper tool to figure out whether something is red. Sure, there are arguments for a color error theory (they fail) but the burden is on the claimants.
No, not at all. That some behaviors are unethical is obvious by normal human assessments. It's on you the burden to show otherwise in the first place.ruby sparks said:In fact, demonstrating that there is even such a thing as moral truth in the first place is a burden you might want to try to lift before you even get on the the other one.
]However, in this context you miss the point again. Jarhyn's theory entails that there is such thing as moral truth - ethical truth in his terminology. So, in order to argue against it, it is proper to assume there is (else, the theory is false on that account alone). This does not even depend on whether it is proper to reckon in general (i.e., when not argue against a specific theory) that there is moral truth (it is, but really not the point here).
Are you serious?Jarhyn said:I'm not and wasn't discussing Jarhyn's claim with you. You can discuss that with Jarhyn.
Discussing it with Jarhyn is exactly what I was doing, when you jumped in: You jumped on a post in which I was replying to Jarhyn's ethical theory. You took that post out of context. Of course Jarhyn agrees that there is ethical truths (read his posts!), and his theory entails that there is (read his posts!), so it would be proper on my part to assume there is ethical truth in the context of testing his theory even if it were not proper to reckon in general (i.e, in other contexts) that there is ethical truth.
Let me try another manner. Suppose that someone claims that God (i.e., omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect agent) exists. In order to argue against that claim, it is proper to assume that there is an omniscient, omnipotent agent, and then argue it is not at all morally perfect. Now, this case is different because there is moral truth, whereas there is no good reason to suspect there is an omniscient, omnipotent agent, but it is not different in the relevant sense, namely that it is okay to use as a hypothesis one or more of the implications of the theory one is criticizing.
Correction: the last quote above is from ruby sparks, not Jarhyn.