Steve:
Harris's premise is that human well-being is a matter of conscious
experience which depends on facts about the world and facts about
ourselves--facts that we can learn about through scientific inquiry. I
don't see how this could be viewed as a nonrational premise. That
morality is a matter of increasing the well-being of sentient
creatures capable of experiencing happiness and suffering is simply a
definition of moral concern. There is nothing nonrational about making
definitions, and it is no arbitrary choice to define conscious
experience as the source of values since anything that is never
experienced could be of no concern. What other source of values--one
that is completely independent of conscious experience--could there
be?
He is content to leave well-being itself as a currently loosely
defined and continually redefined term such as physical health that we
we will better understand be better able to define with precision as
we study it. What is important is that we begin thinking of morality
as something that has to do with well-being and as something that we
can be right or wrong about. There may be multiple peaks on the moral
landscape, but there is an objective difference between moving toward
a peak or moving toward a valley.
Ron:
This seems to be a fairly good comparison with what we mean about the "true"
in experience. But I think it's explained better as not an objective difference,
but truly a difference of betterness. A difference of value.
What you say about Harris's ideas about morality equally applies to truth.
Pragmatic truth is a moral value of betterness of well being.
I would'nt say that "wrong" enters the picture as much as there are
some things that are better than others.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
