This week, Vinny and I discuss everything from operating systems to the conflict in the Mid-East. We apoligize for the delay in getting another episode online. Things have been hectic, but we promise to settle in, and start producing episodes more regul

Morality IS an idea, upon which different people take different approaches. Most often they’re optimizing for their ingroup.

Plato, you ain’t.

>I am able to be rational, which means that all people are rational; a single rational thought negates brain dysfunction in all individuals.

Your ability to be rational only confirms my statement that a person can be rational. It doesn’t follow that many or all people must be rational.

I can conceive of Santa Claus. Thereby providing proof of Santa Claus. I can conceive of martians. Thereby providing proof of martians. I am able to conceive of cold fusion. Thereby providing proof of cold fusion. Where is my Nobel Prize?

I am able to be rational, which means that all people are rational; a single rational thought negates brain dysfunction in all individuals.

That there have been many ideas doesn’t mean any of them have been complete or correct. There’s always lots of speculation on unknown questions, but ultimately refinement down to a single, correct corpus is the end state. The premises are generally what one must refine, except for overlooked faults in argumentation. One may expect a philosophy of morality to develop at least part of the whole, even if parts are missed. Many analyses will in the end turn out to be false starts.

>If there is no premium on either human life or human suffering

Because we can conceive of it, morality exists, even if it’s intangible. The existence of morality implies – at minimum – that there’s a premium on what moral agents do. There’s no reason, and no point, to extend moral duties to anything incapable of even a hint of moral behaviour.

>The ill-defined “moral-agent” and his status

You may be well-read, but evidently none of it made any impact. That a person can be rational is self-evident. That morality exists, because we conceive it, is self-evident. Those are premises. Are they falsifiable? I suppose, but only trivially. We can propose that a person can’t be rational, but the existence of a single rational thought has disproved that. (There’s no requirement that all people must be rational at all times.) We can propose that morality doesn’t exist, but that would contradict the existence of the idea.

Given that a rational being exists and morality exists, rational moral decisions can be made. “Moral agent” is just a definition: an entity which can make rational moral decisions.

That wouldn’t be as far-fetched a likelyhood as you might think. A solipsist as profound as IrC could quite easily believe he’s doing just that.

IrC cannot be wrong (and)
Every noted thinker throughout time who is not IrC is an idiot.

Frankly, with those two, we could extract optimization for IrC’s greatest comfort, and his patent refusal to acknowledge any sort of framework other than his own.

(Which is a sublime failure of both imagination AND logic.) Interesting.

Now, of course, he’s given us some of what he imagines are his premises, but obtusficated them…

The ill-defined “moral-agent” and his status – handed down from some great moral board somewhere? Upon what rubric? – should act in an ill-defined “moral” way with greater burden on those who are “developed”… less feotal? More muscular? Hmm. Developed. Literate? Oooohh… Less Divine. Further, the “morals” of an individual are deduced out of something, but there are no assumptions made other than this diaphonous “moral-agent” and his “status” – which is *AMAZING*, since even all of mathmatics sits on a few critical assumptions (which, thankfully, are explicitly defined), and lacking in any definition of good and evil other than what IrC thinks are correct. Wowza.

See anything else there?

IrC: I’ll accept your badly laid out moral authority when you grow D-Cups and lactate elves out of them.

If there is no premium on either human life or human suffering, then there is no need for us to have a moral code at all. Why would any human action be evil if humans don’t matter?

Who else is looking forward to the return of IrC when he comes back from book-reading?

>Who wrote YOUR universal rules?

No-one; the rules aren’t arbitrary. The rules are deduced.

>And I think that lack of empathy to human suffering is evil.

In view of that statement, I must ask whether you properly understand the meaning of empathy. It isn’t necessary to experience another person’s suffering in actual or virtual terms in order to be against human suffering, and to deduce and act on duties (moral imperatives) to mitigate it. A person who acts benevolently with intent and no empathy is morally indistinguishable from another who acts from the same intent while feeling empathy. People who are not emotive and who express very little empathy aren’t evil; they simply have different personalities. Blame the diversity of nature if you must. Or celebrate diversity, if that’s your way.

Ethics are codes to help people resolve moral dilemmas and overturn the proper ordering of moral imperatives. Ethics aren’t replacements for moral rules; ethics are guidelines for selecting and measuring moral rules. Consider what may be the most extreme example: military ethics. The whole point of military ethics is to codify exceptions to moral proscriptions and the circumstances under which those violations may take place.

>because we have to first assume that human life is somehow important

No, you don’t. That’s an unnecessary assumption. The physical universe and nature simply are what they are. The only importance you have to assume is the status of one moral agent relative to another; the prudent assumption is to assume all moral agents are created equal in stature and accept the corollary that more developed moral agents have the burden of more strongly governing their behaviour.