From: Tedd Hadley <hadley@reliant.yxi.com>
> A conflict can not occur unless one side believes the other's
> beliefs are rationally flawed. That's why we ask questions
> and probe other people's belief systems -- because at first
> glance they appear irrational.
Surely conflicts need not be over whether a belief is rationally flawed.
They can result from different value judgements, e.g. different codes of
morality.
> If you disagree that morality in society has improved, I'd like
> to hear your argument. Otherwise, we must agree that advanced
> intelligence combined with knowledge appears to lead to a greater
> concern to eliminating suffering.
I agree that morality has improved (at least by most people's standards),
but I don't think you can draw conclusions about the morality of the
putative intelligent designer, about whom we're told nothing, based on human
experience. Why should we think that the intelligent designer has anything
in common with humans (other than the basic fact of having intelligence)?
> If it helps to reduce confusion, we could just talk about
> suffering. Does advanced intelligence combined with
> knowledge lead to a desire to reduce suffering? Unless
> here are other important factors not considered, clearly it
> does.
It certainly isn't clear to me that the goal of a moral code must be to
reduce suffering (unless you simply define it that way), nor that an
intelligent being must have any moral code at all.
My present belief is that moral codes are subjective, though partly informed
by objective factors such as genetic inheritance.
However, I've just finished reading a very thought-provoking book ("The
Fabric of Reality" by David Deutsch), which is causing me to reconsider some
of my beliefs. It argues that "if ethics and aesthetics are at all
compatible with the world-view advocated in this book, beauty and rightness
must be as objective as scientific or mathematical truth. And they must be
created in analogous ways, through conjecture and rational criticism." I
don't fully understand the book, and I'm sure I still won't even after I've
read it again. But it does at least attempt to offer a rational argument for
the objectivity of morality and a way to discover it, as opposed to just
"because the Bible says so"!
Has anyone else here read this book? If so, I'd very much like to discuss
it. It's at least partly on topic, as it deals with evolution among other
things.
Richard Wein (Tich)
See my web pages for various games at http://homepages.primex.co.uk/~tich/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 25 2000 - 20:40:53 EDT