It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles. A study of philosophy would tell you that. Logic can take you from one step to another, but at the end of your chain of reason will always lie some pure belief, an act of faith.
For example, many ethical systems can be traced to a few basic axioms, like “human suffering is bad.” Or “humans deserve to live.” Or “all lives have value.” But these are statements that cannot be produced through mathematics. There’s no equation that can tell you it’s a good thing for a child not to die of hunger. At some point, every moral system traces back to certain basic axioms that are pure beliefs, not rationally derived from any logic or mathematical equation.
It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles.
You’ve never read Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals? That’s pretty basic stuff, like Ethics 101 basic.
And I’m not even a huge Kant fan let alone a deontologist, in fact I’m more of a situationist, but you should at least be familiar with the Categorical Imperative before you make a nebulous claim like “A study of philosophy would tell you that.”
Sometimes abstraction is good and necessary, but a statement like “There’s no equation that can tell you it’s a good thing for a child not to die of hunger” is an over-abstraction. There’s no need to abstract it further, because the situation is already concrete. Anyone who has experienced grief can tell you that, and an ivory tower that’s too sterile to taste grief has nothing to offer the world in the way of ethics.
Only a sociopath would have to wrestle with the question of whether there’s anything objectively bad about children dying. Do you expect anyone to try to prove it mathematically? Because that would be entirely the wrong approach.
If you can’t state “living is a good thing, and therefore premature loss of an innocent life is a bad thing” as a first principle, then there could be no point in debating ethics with you because you’re already amoral.
I’m not accusing you of thinking that way, I understand you’re presenting a line of reasoning in the abstract as a thought experiment. I’m simply telling you what my response would be to someone who tried actually arguing along that line.
Where a christian would draw faith from their spiritual deity, a humanist might draw faith from the fact that they’re alive because of the human spirit, no? A “spirit” which only exists because an absurdly bizarre amount of coincidences happened… so many in fact, that it honestly makes total sense that even the most intelligent people among us could believe (or in my perspective: fall for) that it was actually instead the doing of a being who is in a completely different realm of existence from our own.
I promise I’m not just being pedantic or whatever, I’m truly trying to understand how there’s any difference between a philosophy effectively based on some santa-clause-tier shit and one simply based on the (actually phenomenal) evidence we have available.
Hell, I even grew up as a christian before I gained full consciousness and wondered why the fuck god would torture me with a life that is so comically filled with absolute horrors that go beyond anything I would comprehend on my own.
I mean it’s literally not, it’s a philosophy, even the American Humanist Society states so
Lol, as if religion is anything different.
https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/49834413/22829194
Yeah but they’re all dorks so whatever.
True and real
There’s no objective difference between religion and philosophy.
There’s a “rule of thumb” loose categorisation though, but blurry on the edges
There is.
Philosophy is structured and rational thought.
Religion is the opposite. Easy.
It is impossible to construct ethics from first principles. A study of philosophy would tell you that. Logic can take you from one step to another, but at the end of your chain of reason will always lie some pure belief, an act of faith.
For example, many ethical systems can be traced to a few basic axioms, like “human suffering is bad.” Or “humans deserve to live.” Or “all lives have value.” But these are statements that cannot be produced through mathematics. There’s no equation that can tell you it’s a good thing for a child not to die of hunger. At some point, every moral system traces back to certain basic axioms that are pure beliefs, not rationally derived from any logic or mathematical equation.
You’ve never read Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals? That’s pretty basic stuff, like Ethics 101 basic.
And I’m not even a huge Kant fan let alone a deontologist, in fact I’m more of a situationist, but you should at least be familiar with the Categorical Imperative before you make a nebulous claim like “A study of philosophy would tell you that.”
Sometimes abstraction is good and necessary, but a statement like “There’s no equation that can tell you it’s a good thing for a child not to die of hunger” is an over-abstraction. There’s no need to abstract it further, because the situation is already concrete. Anyone who has experienced grief can tell you that, and an ivory tower that’s too sterile to taste grief has nothing to offer the world in the way of ethics.
Only a sociopath would have to wrestle with the question of whether there’s anything objectively bad about children dying. Do you expect anyone to try to prove it mathematically? Because that would be entirely the wrong approach.
If you can’t state “living is a good thing, and therefore premature loss of an innocent life is a bad thing” as a first principle, then there could be no point in debating ethics with you because you’re already amoral.
I’m not accusing you of thinking that way, I understand you’re presenting a line of reasoning in the abstract as a thought experiment. I’m simply telling you what my response would be to someone who tried actually arguing along that line.
Perfectly said, thank you!
One is a way of thinking, the other is an interpretation of reality.
“an interpretation of reality”… so it’s just a re-occurring thought lmao?
No it’s a set of fundamental assumptions about the nature of the universe and reality.
Where a christian would draw faith from their spiritual deity, a humanist might draw faith from the fact that they’re alive because of the human spirit, no? A “spirit” which only exists because an absurdly bizarre amount of coincidences happened… so many in fact, that it honestly makes total sense that even the most intelligent people among us could believe (or in my perspective: fall for) that it was actually instead the doing of a being who is in a completely different realm of existence from our own.
I promise I’m not just being pedantic or whatever, I’m truly trying to understand how there’s any difference between a philosophy effectively based on some santa-clause-tier shit and one simply based on the (actually phenomenal) evidence we have available.
Hell, I even grew up as a christian before I gained full consciousness and wondered why the fuck god would torture me with a life that is so comically filled with absolute horrors that go beyond anything I would comprehend on my own.
The other one is bullshit *
And philosophy isn’t bullshit for sure.
I dunno, some philosophy is bullshit
Yeah, but just because all then all philosophy is bullshit. Some movies are bullshit but not for that the cinema and all the movies are bullshit too.
Anyways, every statement, even stating that philosophy is bullshit or isn’t knowledge, is a philosophic statement to some degree or another.
Arguably every religion would fit in that
Tenets and beliefs