“Good good. Firstly, humans are the only moral agents. Animals aren’t moral agents, since to be one necessitates consciousness. That error poisons your entire analysis.”
This is too quick, I don't know who would endorse this. Using consciousness as the standard, the philosopher is willing to grant all kinds of creatures agency which they clearly do not have. Agency is a capability claim, at minimum predicated upon those able to reason among alternatives. To be plausible, I think a language capable of communicating mutual expectations is also necessary.
You have the philosopher go on to expound upon this consciousness requirement, but it gets off on the wrong foot. The fact that action reflects some measure of biologically instilled prudence is not going to get the doer of that action to moral agency on its own.
Yeah I should have used a different word. Looking at the Google definition it seems to encompass a lot of animals, but I meant a definition that only applies to humans and maybe chimpanzees. It included empathy and moral deliberation which I thought the philosopher would find necessary. I’ll edit this after work to rectify this mistake!
I was trying to appeal to a super “laymen” idea that it is good to do what you want to do. The car example makes my position seem unintuitive to “laymen” (I hate that word but I can’t think of a synonym at the moment) but then I used common sense to reverse the unintuitiveness on to the other side. So basically “good to do” is the answer. By good to do I mean it is part of a life well lived (making decisions and doing them)
I would say part of that would be doing things you want to do, such as reading outrageous fortune notes. I find that pretty fulfilling and I think most would share that. But even then I wouldn’t enforce that as a rule, I would just say it seems common in the population. So I used it as evidence that my position on the car example actually isn’t that unintuitive. What makes a life well lived for you?
So I took the point of the car example to be demonstrating that once you strip away our evolutionarily-debunked normativity, all that is left is instrumental rationality. It's a content-neutral principle connecting means and ends, with nothing to say about the value of either. But this line you're taking here seems like a different course, endorsing the truth of subjectivism based on... (debunked) intuitions?
“Good good. Firstly, humans are the only moral agents. Animals aren’t moral agents, since to be one necessitates consciousness. That error poisons your entire analysis.”
This is too quick, I don't know who would endorse this. Using consciousness as the standard, the philosopher is willing to grant all kinds of creatures agency which they clearly do not have. Agency is a capability claim, at minimum predicated upon those able to reason among alternatives. To be plausible, I think a language capable of communicating mutual expectations is also necessary.
You have the philosopher go on to expound upon this consciousness requirement, but it gets off on the wrong foot. The fact that action reflects some measure of biologically instilled prudence is not going to get the doer of that action to moral agency on its own.
Yeah I should have used a different word. Looking at the Google definition it seems to encompass a lot of animals, but I meant a definition that only applies to humans and maybe chimpanzees. It included empathy and moral deliberation which I thought the philosopher would find necessary. I’ll edit this after work to rectify this mistake!
« You should execute the goals you want to execute, and vice versa »
what do you mean by should?
I was trying to appeal to a super “laymen” idea that it is good to do what you want to do. The car example makes my position seem unintuitive to “laymen” (I hate that word but I can’t think of a synonym at the moment) but then I used common sense to reverse the unintuitiveness on to the other side. So basically “good to do” is the answer. By good to do I mean it is part of a life well lived (making decisions and doing them)
what makes a life well lived? In other words: what is the good life?
I would say part of that would be doing things you want to do, such as reading outrageous fortune notes. I find that pretty fulfilling and I think most would share that. But even then I wouldn’t enforce that as a rule, I would just say it seems common in the population. So I used it as evidence that my position on the car example actually isn’t that unintuitive. What makes a life well lived for you?
So I took the point of the car example to be demonstrating that once you strip away our evolutionarily-debunked normativity, all that is left is instrumental rationality. It's a content-neutral principle connecting means and ends, with nothing to say about the value of either. But this line you're taking here seems like a different course, endorsing the truth of subjectivism based on... (debunked) intuitions?
hanging out with you :)