Who hear thinks..........

[TagliatelliMonster]

Okay, so only with science as objective, why should you be moral?

See, questions like this tells me that you aren't actually really trying to comprehend the points I'm making. This "discussion" with you literally started with this reply I made earlier to YOU:

I'ld rather say that we can't learn from science WHY to do good and bad.
But we most definitely can learn HOW to do good and bad.

Are you actually interested in a discussion, or are you just here to argue for the sake of arguing?
I literally started out by saying the above.


In any case....
Why be moral? Well, if you are not going to care about well-being and suffering, then why even bother discussing morality?

I'ld rather live in a society where people care about maximizing well-being and decreasing suffering. I think that would make for a more pleasant life then a society where people don't care or worse: prefer suffering over well-being.

It would also be better of society and social cohesion as a whole if most people thought like that. And being a social species that depend on cooperation for survival, I'ld say that it's a pretty good idea to try and be moral. That is, if we are going to care at all about survival and well-being.

If you don't care about that, then fine. I'm going to call you an immoral person and you're going to have a though time overall surviving in society. More then likely, you're not going to do very well, have little friends and chances of ending up in a ditch or jail are quite big.

And how do you act objectively as moral?

I can't make real sense of this question. Wording sounds weird.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

No, actual link as per wrong to a science site.

I'm sorry, there is no link to a site that covers the whole of medical science.
That would be multiple multi-year university level courses.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I'm sorry, there is no link to a site that covers the whole of medical science.
That would be multiple multi-year university level courses.

No, wrong as you used it above and then link to an actual science site as for how you used wrong. Remember it must explain wrong as science!

I VERY MUCH disagree.

I'ld rather say that we can't learn from science WHY to do good and bad.
But we most definitely can learn HOW to do good and bad.

So back to the basics. There is no objective universal we for how to do good and bad.
Objective: expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations

Definition of OBJECTIVE

expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations; limited to choices of fixed alternatives and reducing subjective factors to a minimum… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

But personal feelings as moral emotions as good and bad are not objective.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

No, wrong as you used it above and then link to an actual science site as for how you used wrong. Remember it must explain wrong as science!

Please rephrase this into something that is a bit sensible.
As it stands, I have no idea what you are trying to say.
Sounds like you are trying to move the goalposts, but I'm not sure.

So back to the basics.

Translation: let's just ignore that you completely ignored the actual point that I was making and pretend the entire conversation didn't take place?

There is no objective universal we for how to do good and bad.

You should really proof read your posts before hitting that post button. This is barely an english sentence. I think I know what you are saying, but it's a bit tiring to have to decipher it.

As I have said multiple times already, in a nutshell:
- good = that which maximizes well-being / minimizes suffering
- bad = that which maximizes suffering / minimizes well-being

We can discern the difference between well-being and suffering. We can analyse how actions and decisions affect sentient beings in terms of well-being and suffering.
Therefor, we are able to determine what actions are "good" and which are "bad" in moral terms.

It's not hard. Not hard to understand anyway. Actually determining how actions / decision affect well-being and suffering can be quite hard at times. And sometimes even impossible, since we don't know everything about everything.

But therefor, knowledge about and understanding of the world / reality informs our moral judgement.

And how do we obtain knowledge about / understanding of the world / reality?

Objective: expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations

Correct.

Hitting someone with a baseball bat will inflict pain. This is not an opinion.

But personal feelings as moral emotions as good and bad are not objective.

If by "good" you don't mean that it is beneficial for overall well-being and by "bad" you don't mean that it's detrimental to well-being, then I have no clue what you are talking about when you use those words.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Please rephrase this into something that is a bit sensible.
As it stands, I have no idea what you are trying to say.
Sounds like you are trying to move the goalposts, but I'm not sure.


...

You said something is wrong with sociopaths and psychopaths. Please link to an actual science site for that including worng.

I wiil answer the rest later.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

You said something is wrong with sociopaths and psychopaths.

Wth?

Sociopathy and psychopathy are personality disorders.
They are a diagnosis. Established through a series of tests and identification of symptoms. Studies also show underpinnings in genetics and abnormalities in the brain...

Sociopath: Traits, Diagnosis, Treatment, and More

A sociopath is someone who has antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Here are the symptoms, treatment options, and how to cope.

www.healthline.com

Psychopathy | Definition, Studies, Characteristics, Origins, & Treatment | Britannica

Psychopathy, personality disorder characterized by a set of dysfunctional interpersonal, emotional, lifestyle, and antisocial tendencies. Persons suffering from psychopathy—sometimes called psychopaths—commonly exhibit a lack of empathy or remorse and manifest impulsiveness, manipulativeness, and

www.britannica.com

You were not aware of this?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

...

As I have said multiple times already, in a nutshell:
- good = that which maximizes well-being / minimizes suffering
- bad = that which maximizes suffering / minimizes well-being

...

How are those objective facts for your 2 claims.

That you say something doesn't make it objective. You should know that. If it is objective then you can give evidence for that and not just say it.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Wth?

Sociopathy and psychopathy are personality disorders.
...

...

Generally, it's psychopaths / sociopaths who seem unable to infer the suffering of others.
Incidently, these conditions mean that there is something wrong with those people. They are not a confirmation that suffering is just a matter of mere opinion.

Evidence as per science that there is something wrong with them as something wrong.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

And thereby attempt to increase overall well-being / decrease the suffering of those others.

At one's personal expense. You seem to have missed the point.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Neither are appropriate choices.

If you want to live a moral life, then you have only one option: evaluate your actions and decisions through moral reasoning.

I suppose I was including that as part of trusting your gut.

I do think self reflection does help us improve in terms of those behaviors that we consciously want to cultivate. But it remains the case that in the immediate instance a moral dilemma occurs, our response is instinctual, not rational.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Gathering data, drawing a conclusion from that data and then further testing that conclusion against additional data being gathered in the future (I assume), sounds pretty sciency to me.

That's not what I did.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

If you want to live a moral life you have two choices: the first is to join a faith community; the second is too trust your gut.

I read philosophy. Afterall, philosophy deals extensively with ethics and morality amd it presents us with scenarios and thought machines to force us to think about and consider our positions and what we think is moral.

 

[Left Coast]

It wasn't obvious to people hundreds of years a go and so people believed in the supernatural for explanations

But many now believe science is the best way to answer these questions, however some people try and confuse the notion without any logical reasoning. For example, type of language used, or a subjective perspective, or the type of knowing

It's obvious we wouldn't know what water is made from without science, or the rotation of the Earth and so on.

This is a common New Atheist caricature of people's understanding of the world from the past. You really don't think people hundreds of years ago knew people can't walk on water? Or that they couldn't accurately predict the Sun coming up each morning? They didn't always understand the why behind the answers to those questions as well as we do, but they weren't morons. They also didn't just think everything was magic. They understood there were mundane, natural explanations for most things. Science was invented and developed by people starting hundreds of years ago. In the West, it was precisely because people believed God had created an ordered universe governed by stable laws that they believed they could study and uncover the principles of how things work.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

You make the excellent point that the sun doesn’t come up at all, and that it was science which discerned that.

In particular, recent generations of scientists have recognised that previous generations of scientists were, despite all their carefully recorded and analysed observations, wrong about something so apparently obvious (but misleading) in nature.

Knowing this should encourage humility from future generations of scientists.

I'm not really clear on this previous generation of scientists that you refer to here or of their carefully recorded and analyzed observations regarding the sun.

I'm not aware that ancient beliefs about the rising of the sun, or, by extension, geocentricism, were the result of the scientific method, analysis of observations or a scientific conclusion.

I do agree that humility, skepticism and constant questioning should persist among scientists. But borrowing overwhelming and very robust new evidence, current theory remains the best answers we have. To ignore that fact is not an act of humility as I consider the state.

 

[RestlessSoul]

I'm not really clear on this previous generation of scientists that you refer to here or of their carefully recorded and analyzed observations regarding the sun.

I'm not aware that ancient beliefs about the rising of the sun, or, by extension, geocentricism, were the result of the scientific method, analysis of observations or a scientific conclusion.

I do agree that humility, skepticism and constant questioning should persist among scientists. But borrowing overwhelming and very robust new evidence, current theory remains the best answers we have. To ignore that fact is not an act of humility as I consider the state.

Astronomy didn't begin with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, far from it. The Ptolomeic astronomical model was based on rigorous analysis of empirical evidence, and conformed so closely to observation, that it took centuries, not decades, for the heliocentric model to replace it as standard.

Ptolemy | Accomplishments, Biography, & Facts

As for the current standard model of cosmology, with it's reliance on undetectable dark matter and energy, it's dependence on finely tuned parameters, and various other anomalies, it's the best we have until we reject it in favour of something else; just as Newton's conception of gravity was the best we had until general relativity replaced it.

 

[Madsaac]

This is a common New Atheist caricature of people's understanding of the world from the past. You really don't think people hundreds of years ago knew people can't walk on water? Or that they couldn't accurately predict the Sun coming up each morning? They didn't always understand the why behind the answers to those questions as well as we do, but they weren't morons. They also didn't just think everything was magic. They understood there were mundane, natural explanations for most things. Science was invented and developed by people starting hundreds of years ago. In the West, it was precisely because people believed God had created an ordered universe governed by stable laws that they believed they could study and uncover the principles of how things work.

Yeah why, back then people thought God made those things happen before science explanations, or made their own subjective ideas up about those types of things. It's all relative to the levels of science understanding.

Now, advancements in science are even allowing us to understand how our brains work and why we think in a certain way.

Science knows no bounds and I love it, thinking philosophically is great and I love that as well, but our philosophical outlooks on life becomes clearer with science explanations.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Science knows no bounds

Science is absolutely awesome, but it certainly has bounds.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Yeah why, back then people thought God made those things happen before science explanations, or made their own subjective ideas up about those types of things. It's all relative to the levels of science understanding.

Now, advancements in science are even allowing us to understand how our brains work and why we think in a certain way.

Science knows no bounds and I love it, thinking philosophically is great and I love that as well, but our philosophical outlooks on life becomes clearer with science explanations.

No, there are problems in philosophy that science haven't solved today.
In short they are here for the practice of being a human:

Science has limits: A few things that science does not do - Understanding Science

undsci.berkeley.edu

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Astronomy didn't begin with Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, far from it. The Ptolomeic astronomical model was based on rigorous analysis of empirical evidence, and conformed so closely to observation, that it took centuries, not decades, for the heliocentric model to replace it as standard.

Ptolemy | Accomplishments, Biography, & Facts

I don't deny the history of astronomy, but you make is sound like it is reasonable to make a head to head comparison between then and now. And that it is not. It was another nascent field contaminated with facts, beliefs and spurious conclusions that were less often from data. And "rigorous analysis" is a relative term and in no way the equivalent of modern analysis techniques, rigor or the much greater and constant review of today.

They accomplished much and I still agree that any lessons of skepticism that arise from the example are valuable, but by I can't accept a straight comparison of the two using the descriptive terms you apply that mean something much different now.

As for the current standard model of cosmology, with it's reliance on undetectable dark matter and energy, it's dependence on finely tuned parameters, and various other anomalies, it's the best we have until we reject it in favour of something else; just as Newton's conception of gravity was the best we had until general relativity replaced it.

But Newton's theory still has the value of utility in applications where its limitation are recognized and accounted for.

Notably, I would concur that we update our understanding with more data, new insights and the continual growth of understanding itself.

I suppose my concern here isn't really with your view as it is with what others might read into this. I've already seen many creationists attempt to use the fact of advancing knowledge and understanding while discarding past understanding to imply or claim it as a weakness of science. One where they seem to feel that the fact of contingency with understanding means that which is accepted can be dismissed without review and their belief can be substituted as the answer.

I don't make that claim lightly either. There are members currently using that model to argue against and to deny science.

 

[Left Coast]

Yeah why, back then people thought God made those things happen before science explanations, or made their own subjective ideas up about those types of things. It's all relative to the levels of science understanding.

This is a category error. Earlier generations of humans didn't think of the natural explanations they discovered as replacing the divine. They believed the natural explanations were how God creates and sustains the world. They didn't see the dichotomy that some do now between natural and spiritual.

Science knows no bounds and I love it,

Science knows no bounds? Dang. Actual scientists must be cringing reading that. You have as much faith in science as theists do in God! Reminds me of the Bible: "With [Science] nothing is impossible."