BrimstoneSalad wrote:Even if they narrow down to a range of two or three qualities, we can at least look at what they all have in common. In the overlap of the venn diagram of all of them, we can find unambiguous good
The remaining ideas(maybe hundreds) that are logically coherent may have nothing to do with each other. It seems like most likely there wouldn't be any overlap between all possible moral ideas.
In the case of the two you presented, they are direct negations of each other, so it already seems like the overlap idea would fail without even needing to find all the other coherent moral ideas.
BrimstoneSalad wrote:With "Preference egoism" at least you'll admit to that being a decent summary. Will you admit that this makes up the majority of egoists in practice?
How is this relevant to questions of what is really good or bad? I don’t know what the ratio of different types of egoists are. The fact this is something you would need me to admit confuses me.
BrimstoneSalad wrote:Real egoists reject any imposition of you telling them what interests they should have like that.
I don’t see how what these supposed “ Real egoists” think matters for this discussion
BrimstoneSalad wrote:If it's not something you're convinced of by now, you may just have to tentatively accept it as one of the rules of discussion on this forum.
I specifically told you I was convinced of the value of logic in my last post. I see the logical absolutes as having uniquely solid justification due to the fact we are forced to use them to argue anything(or communicate at all?), but many bedrock philosophical ideas(like mathematics, induction, occam's razor) are still justified with intuition at their root, so i’m not sure why you are setting up logic and intuition as if they were a dichotomy. In the same way that intuition is used for these while still being considered logical and rational, it doesn’t seem irrational that morality could require an intuitive foundation as well ( except for those you actually do manage to prove contradictions in).
I see the issue where this makes it easier for religious people to set their foundational justifications as god or whatever else they want, but then you need to point out the way to differentiate between the two. You have to show what is fundamentally different about the intuition used to justify the truth of math, induction, or occam's razor that doesn't apply to the silly foundations of god or magic. I'm sure there is a better answer to this than just telling me to step in line or you will ban me. If this is figured out, then it seems like most questions about how to proceed with morality will be figured out as well.
Do you see no problem with answering the question "what should we do to be good" with "whatever you want to do
I see a problem with that intuitively of course, but you are the one advocating that intuition shouldn’t be given any weight. Logically, it seems consistent. It still specifies what is to be considered good and bad without being gibberish or contradicting itself.
It's not consistent, it's meaningless.
It's like defining god as "god is god".
Meaningful to you and logically consistent are two different things. You can’t just say it’s inconsistent, you have to show where the logical inconsistency is. The bit about God being defined as “god is god” made no sense to me. Please elaborate.
BrimstoneSalad wrote:
The premise of the question "what should we do to be moral?" suggests that there must be things that are moral and things that are not moral (or that are immoral) within our control
You can't attempt to do what you don't want (in sum) to do in a given situation; you can only see an outcome which didn't occur as you wanted by accident.
Does functional meaning refer to morality that is “Within our control”? Even if the only metric being measured is a being's propensity towards accidents being considered wrong, that doesn’t mean the moral system is logically inconsistent, it just might make it seem silly to us personally.
Why did you add “Within our control” as a necessary component to morality? When asking “ What is a good or bad action?” It doesn’t seem necessary to include this. Morality could be independent of whether any humans ever do the right thing or if every human must do the right thing and still could be logically consistent.
Hedonistic egoism, which is the only form of egoism I have voluntarily brought up, seems to even fit your extra criteria of “within our control” though, so i’m not seeing where hedonistic egoism is inconsistent even by your standards.
BrimstoneSalad wrote:Let's say it came down to two basic consistent and non-arbitrary options:
1. Positively value the interests of others.
2. Negatively value the interests of others.
In this case (a case I don't necessarily agree with) both would be equal contenders based on requiring an objective and non-arbitrary system.
...You could call the choice between those two arbitrary, or you could call it guessing;
You seem to be making it clear here that the final popular opinion choice between the many remaining systems has nothing to do with one being any more true than the other. It’s just practical advice for not confusing people, but It seems like if it was true that #2 was the correct set of actions, then we should advocate for it regardless of how much it confuses people. If finding truth between the remaining options would actually be equivalent to guessing, At that point it seems like the intellectually honest answer would be to reserve judgement about morality.
