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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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How do you envision a proof of a moral/ethical principle as valid or invalid to actually proceed?

The hard requirement is that there's some sort of moral absolute from/to which to trace validity. Moral relativism is chaotic meaninglessness. You can't "prove" anything from chaos.

More generally, however, I'm not sure that I see much value in wholly secular moral / ethic philosophy. I see it failing in one of two directions. Either (a) You get into a sort of recursive set of definitions. This is the Sam Harris issue as he tries to define "good" morals as "those things that help to realize human flourishing." Okay, well, what does "flourishing" mean? And what if two people, or groups, use it to mean different things? The other failure mode (b) is when you do create an internally coherent rubric that seeks to maximize some sort of measurable norm. Enter utilitarianism and, eventually, effective altruism (Singer et al). You can concoct some sort of scheme that lets you say things like "in order to maximize the happiness function, in aggregate, of all humanity .... it's totally alright to unalive the following criteria of already existing humans ..."

Furthermore, secular moral philosophy seems to me to be amazingly epistemically arrogant. The complex system of systems of 7 billion people (with different languages, cultures, etc.) is on its face impossible to model with any accuracy, let alone to make normative recommendations for. But, the EA types have revealed themselves to be bad at the smart thinkin'. When you start to worship the Chubby Behemoth, you can update your priors all you want, but dividing by zero was probably when it all went sideways.