Amazing, after reading the book "ethical intuitionism" I turned into an ethical intuitionist, and I'll read this book many many times because there are still things I couldn't understand at the beginning, but taking an overview about the idea, it's just amazing. I'm glad I could find professor Michael Huemer.
Very cool, I am sympathetic to his view, although I do not consider myself an intuitionist. What are some things you liked and/or didn't understand? I just interviewed Russ Shafer Landau a prominent Moral Realist so if you are sympathetic to moral realism see the podcast! There are more episodes than what I current have uploaded.
The problem with ethical statements is that they are poorly defined. They are ought statements about behavior. "I ought to give charity. I ought not torture kittens." What does that mean? Imperative statements assume purpose. If I say "you ought not take I-95 N", the immediate question is about the context. "Why not?" Or "When?" Etc. And a clarifying teleological answer must follow for it to make sense: "Because you're trying to go from Boston to NYC". Oughtness involves purpose. What does it mean that I ought not torture children or ought to give charity? To what purpose (not)? Some meta-ethical answers are essentially collapsible to subjectivism. I want to maximize happiness. That's a subjective aesthetic goal. I want to cultivate good character traits. I want to engage in behaviors and obey rules that will maximize my happiness. But most people intuitively feel that ethics are objective. It is globally wrong to torture children (in a particular circumstance). There is some objective purpose which is violated by child torture that is beyond my personal aesthetics and my personal character development goals or eudomania. This sense of universal purpose that defines oughtness is what envokes the sense of God: a universal creator who endowed the universe with a purpose. Btw, the example of mathematics is wrong. Math is definitely subjective. It doesn't exist "out there" as math-truths floating in ideal platonic universe. It's a series of memes copied between brains of how logically to organize and map measurements of our sense-facts. It happens to be that it works because humans have linguistic abilities, due to having evolved to communicate with each other, and language is a form of symbolic mapping of the outside world onto internal representations. We do the same with math, but then we also meta-map those representations internally, and so on. So, map is a form of language of quantifiable observations. It's not some objective reality. Asking what God thinks about certain theorem is like asking what God think is the correct way of spelling a word. It's a matter of human convention, not Divine Will. (One may argue that it's Divine Will that humans came up with the particular convention, but that's another conversation.) Also, the entire conversation about God and ethics is very dualistic. If one conceives of God and us non-dually, then ethics becomes means of achieving the goal for which God expresses as ourselves in His thought. It's like asking "what is my part in this dream that the larger-Me is dreaming".
listening to the section on subjectivism, and apparently huemer is blissfully unaware of presuppositional apologetics, which does indeed claim that everything (including logic and mathematics) is contingent and has to be founded on god's will
@nosteinnogate7305 they might think evidentialism is a more persuasive apologetics strategy but presup is literally just classical theism. classical theism can't be true if there are any necessary truths besides god's existence
I was surprised too. I mean the idea that Platonic ideas (and therefore numbers, logical laws etc) are ideas in the mind of God is a theory that goes back to the early Scholastic period, and lives on in Berkeley, among others. It's super common.
I would love to hear some real world examples of morality. Say someone like Saddam Hussein or Pablo Escobar who have this great power, they killed and murdered anyone who opposed them, my question is why ought they not do that to retain their power and control and money. I dont think you need to be a sociopath to do these things, the reality is who are these people looking after, themselves and who do they value, themselves and there power and money. The question is why at all do they have this obligation or duty to not do what they want and kill anyone who opposes them or tries to bring them down. Thats what I would ask Micheal Huemer. He is an atheist, right.
no god needed. humans are by nature socially cooperative and dependent creatures. wrong actions are wrong because they lead to the destruction of the society a human needs in order to survive.
