Angra Mainyu
Veteran Member
I prefer the term 'showing' rather than 'demonstrating', as the latter might be interpreted in the sense of logical entailment. But details aside, I have shown something. Something that is already obvious, namely that immorality and other properties are attitude independent. Since it was obvious - it's the verdict of a human faculty with no good reasons to mistrust it -, there was no burden on my part. But I chose to go the extra parsec and make an argument anyway.ruby sparks said:Honestly, I think you need to reassess what it is you imagine you're supposed to be demonstrating. You've spent a heap of time and effort on tortuous and complicated scenarios and you haven't really shown anything much.
That is not a questionable claim. It is obviously the proper way. If you want to make color assessments, the proper way is to use the human color sense. It might fail, but that is the proper way. If you want to make assessments of health and illness (i.e., whether someone showing some symptoms is ill), the proper way is to use the human intuitive sense of illness/health. Of course, it might fail. Or it might get insufficient or wrong info. But that is the proper way. And the same for moral assessments. There is absolutely no other reasonable candidate to do that.ruby sparks said:But all you did was you just came out with what seems to be a questionable claim about the human moral sense being the proper tool to make moral assessments, and that this somehow 'shows independence'.
That is so insulting. I hope one day you come to realize how wrong you were. Of course, words have meaning. If you change the meaning of 'red' and you define 'red=car' for example, then when you say 'red' you are not talking about color, but about cars. When you want to talk about immorality, permissibility, and other moral properties, it would be a big mistake to redefine the terms - you would be talking about something else.ruby sparks said:That one must be written in The Book Of Angra, chapter 7, verse 25, or something. I don't know whether it's in the same chapter as 'if you're not talking about colour in the everyday colloquial sense then you're not talking about colour', but that verse could be in there somewhere, possibly as a commandment.
Sure it is. I already pointed out it would be unreasonable to think that what makes his behavior immoral is his attitude of considering it not immoral. And it is apparent that this is not so. But if you want, you can just test that theory. Let us modify S14:ruby sparks said:Nope. Your actual, last-person-left merely deemed his own actions not immoral. That's not independent of his attitudes.
S14: A few centuries into the future, Jack is one of the colonists going to a nearby planetary system. He is a psychopathic serial killer, and is planning to do all sorts of killings for fun. He goes into cryosleep with everyone else, but plants a reprograms his pod to wake up a day earlier than scheduled. He also plants a virus so that no one is warned when he wakes up. So, he does wake up. And he proceeds to murder 3 members of the 4-people crew, one by one, and before they knew what hit them. The fourth one, Sally, he takes by surprise, beats up, and then tortures slowly, to get the codes to access the main functions of the ship. Then, he murders her too. After that, he kills everyone else on the ship, by rigging the cryopods to give them a lethal electroshock. They don't know what hit them, either. He also plans to wreak havoc on the ground, on arrival to planet #294, his destination. He reckons he can't just land with everyone else dead - that would raise questions! So, instead, he programs the ship to collide with the colony. Since the colony is new and still pretty small, a direct hit to the inhabited area will kill everyone, he thinks. He is going to abandon ship on a small pod, and land in an area for landing and launching ships. He will then live there, and lauch again on a different ship, in course to Earth, to kill more people. He thinks his actions are not immoral.
Unbeknown to Jack, while he was in cryosleep, a massive war broke out on Earth, and it got to the colony. Tens of thousands of nukes were used, as well as smart killer robots, and bioweapons. Humans were all killed. As for the colony, a bunch of killer robots got there faster (better propulsion system, no need for life support) and killed everone. All of the other colony ships were also blown up. Result? After he killed everyone else on board, the only human being left in the universe is Jack. There are also no aliens smarter than, say, a frog. So, all of the actions he carried out after he murdered all of the other colonists, where considered fine by everyone in the universe ("everyone"="Jack").
S15: A few centuries into the future, Jack is one of the colonists going to a nearby planetary system. He is a psychopathic serial killer, and is planning to do all sorts of killings for fun. He goes into cryosleep with everyone else, but plants a reprograms his pod to wake up a day earlier than scheduled. He also plants a virus so that no one is warned when he wakes up. So, he does wake up. And he proceeds to murder 3 members of the 4-people crew, one by one, and before they knew what hit them. The fourth one, Sally, he takes by surprise, beats up, and then tortures slowly, to get the codes to access the main functions of the ship. Then, he murders her too. After that, he kills everyone else on the ship, by rigging the cryopods to give them a lethal electroshock. They don't know what hit them, either. He also plans to wreak havoc on the ground, on arrival to planet #294, his destination. He reckons he can't just land with everyone else dead - that would raise questions! So, instead, he programs the ship to collide with the colony. Since the colony is new and still pretty small, a direct hit to the inhabited area will kill everyone, he thinks. He is going to abandon ship on a small pod, and land in an area for landing and launching ships. He will then live there, and lauch again on a different ship, in course to Earth, to kill more people. He thinks his actions are immoral. That turns him on even further.
Unbeknown to Jack, while he was in cryosleep, a massive war broke out on Earth, and it got to the colony. Tens of thousands of nukes were used, as well as smart killer robots, and bioweapons. Humans were all killed. As for the colony, a bunch of killer robots got there faster (better propulsion system, no need for life support) and killed everone. All of the other colony ships were also blown up. Result? After he killed everyone else on board, the only human being left in the universe is Jack. There are also no aliens smarter than, say, a frog. So, all of the actions he carried out after he murdered all of the other colonists, where considered fine by everyone in the universe ("everyone"="Jack").
Now, in S14, Jack's attempt to kill everyone in the colony for fun, was immoral behavior, even though he believed it was not immoral. But in S15, Jack's attempt to kill everyone in the colony for fun, was immoral behavior, which he believed was immoral. So, the immorality of Jack's attempt to kill everyone in the colony for fun is independent of his beliefs on whether it is immoral.
Not at all. The woo is always in your head, falsely accusing me of it, even though you will never realize that. No, you misconstrue my words. I said I was not arguing against an ideal-observer theory, not that I was proposing it. I am not. But furthermore, ideal observer theory is not remotely like that. It is not in general woo - it might take that form, but usually it does not.ruby sparks said:Ideal observers, eh? This is where I start to smell something that's starting to smell a bit like woo-type-stuff, especially if the ideal observer's moral sense is supposed to be 'the proper tool to make moral assessments', and that this 'shows independence'.
No, that's your woo-false-accusation emitter at play. I am not even proposing such a theory. I am saying that I was arguing against the theories that say that immorality depends on the beliefs, attitudes, etc. of actual people ('actual' in the scenario), not against ideal observer theories. I did not say I was proposing it. At any rate, generally those theories do not involve woo, though some might.ruby sparks said:How does it do that last thing, one wonders. Are we talking about an ideal, independent observer that might start to resemble a god, that can have 'all the facts', know everything, and know what's best and right and wrong about everything?
First, no, those are not my ideal observers.ruby sparks said:Your 'ideal observers' just seem to be doing their own deeming, that's all. That's not independent of attitudes.
Second, it would not be independent of attitudes in a sense (because it is the attitude of the ideal observer), but it would for all intents and purposes work exactly like moral realism (e.g., if someone says 'X is immoral' and someone else says 'X is not immoral', one of them is mistaken, some behaviors are immoral, etc.), and it would be independent of attitudes in the sense we are discussing here, so I'm not trying to knock it out.