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Sorry, the what now? Where did that come from? I feel like I'm missing some axioms or something.
Let me clarify what I meant. I could see the flaws in a couple different attempts to science their way across the is-ought gap to a scientific moral realism. This is not what you're doing, so it's not your position.
I argue it in the following sentences. I specifically said the material world as we perceive it. Should I post the exact same thing again? If you think that my stance on moral relativity is incompatible with my stance on the material world, I think you need to make that argument more clearly, instead of just continuing to say "Wah? What?".
maybe you are missing some of my relevant axioms, I'm happy to fill them in if you're actually curious. It doesn't feel like you are.
Ok. Well thanks for that. I agree you can't science your way across the is-ought gap, and have no interest in trying. The fact that at least current New Atheists appear to try to do that is part of why I have low interest in their position.
I'm not that enamored of science.
No reply to my accusation of a lack of charity? That doesn't concern you?
No, you really don't. You just say "the material world as we perceive it" and then go on to talk about something "working". I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "the material world as we perceive it". Are you just talking about subjective perceptions? If so, what is this "material world" that we are supposedly perceiving? Sounds like we actually just have subjective perceptions.
Not really. Such accusations are cheap to throw around and are usually bullshit.
You know what it means colloquially, but here is a more extensive explanation of how I would describe the material world:
It is the seemingly mostly consistent thing that we infer via our subjective perceptions. We peer through an unreliable lens. There is something on the other side that can’t be perfectly known. Whatever the stuff is on the other side that generally responds consistently to experiment, that is what we call the material world.
It appears to be a system or substrate that follows mostly consistent rules that we, whatever we are, exist within or on.
Science is the practice of measuring and manipulating that mostly consistent stuff on the other side of the lens. Therefore, science does not raise the problem of relativism, because the only justification it needs is that it effectively gives a person tools to manipulate the material world. As long as it is helpful for doing that, it is justified as legit science. That doesn't justify it morally or anything, to be clear. It just justifies it as science.
But morals are not justified by being useful for getting some kind of result. They have to be justified by being good or right or noble. And those do not have the same simple test as science, so they raise the problem of justifying moral axioms.
Alright
You're confusing "there is a material world" with "science has something to do with 'usefulness' (however ill-defined)". Your first section was a bit about the so-called "material world":
Stop here. Someone could probably write something very similar about the moral world. Nothing about hazily-defined "useful" or "result" needed.
Then, after a huuuuuge conceptual leap, you jump to science as a practice. Ok. Perhaps there are practices out there which help us get to some consistency with what is on the other side of the moral lens. We'd need to do some pretty significant philosophical lifting to describe when there are or aren't possible practices to help us get some consistency with what is on the other side of various lenses.
Would you please, 30 comments down, tell him what you believe?
At this point, it doesn't matter what I believe. At this point, there is only one possible nugget of a thought which has any chance of altering anything about the way he thinks, and that is, "Maybe I (@Crake) don't have a trivial knock-down argument against moral realism that doesn't do significant philosophical damage in other domains."
Because right now, he thinks he does. And he thinks it's trivial. The only real path forward is to show him that, when he properly reasons through his argument, there is a sliiiiiiight difficulty beyond it being trivial. Then, perhaps, he may one day realize that it might actually be somewhat difficult, even. Then, and only then, will there be any chance to start to say, "Well, if we think about it in this different fashion, some of those difficulties go away." But right now, that is utterly impossible, so long as he thinks the whole thing is just trivially settled.
This is part of why I was saying that I would probably have to bow out soon. It's the same sense of triviality that I've seen from all sorts of adjacent folks in the past who think that the material world obviously just is, trivially... and that "science" just magically settles all questions, trivially. Yes, I'm aware this is the school of thought people were steeped in; just do the thing, say the words, and don't worry about the presuppositions or foundations; it's useful! But just like dealing with GPT, I've realized that sometimes the best way to proceed is just to say, "Think step-by-step," and then see how things develop.
You’re not debating this in a fair manner imo, you’re throwing gotchas from the ether. You can’t ask him to endlessly redefine his terms and appeal to a vague philosophic consensus without making your own attackable case. Is your point 'it's complicated'? For the record I take the sam harris position. See how that helps you understand from where my criticism is coming from, as well as give you a chance to land a few blows of your own?
I really don't think they're gotchas. I think it is genuinely saying, "Think step-by-step." And then I'm observing some difficulties with his steps.
At this point, essentially yes. As I said above, I think that's about the only point that is likely possible to get across in this conversation, at this time. I'm not looking for a way to land a few blows of my own. I'm thinking that the most productive line of discussion toward any sort of movement on the problem is to just show that the reasoning required is slightly more difficult than trivial.
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