Comment by jychang
4 hours ago
Yes!
Otherwise you're just outsourcing your critical thinking to other people. A system of just "You will be punished for X" without analysis becomes "Derp, just do things that I won't be punished for". Or more sinister, "just hand your identification papers over to the officer and you won't be punished, don't think about it". Rule of power is not a recipe for a functional system. This becomes a blend of sociology and philosophy, but on the sociology side, you don't want a fear-based or shame-based society anyways.
Your latter example ("Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice") is actually a good example of the core aspect of Hume's philosophy, so if you're trying to avoid the philosophical logic discussion, that's not gonna work either. If you follow the conclusions of that statement to its implications, you end up back at moral philosophy.
That's not a bad thing! That's like a chef asking "how do i cook X" and understanding the answer ("how the maillard reaction works") eventually goes to chemistry. That's just how the world is. Of course, you might be a bit frustrated if you're a chef who doesn't know chemistry, or a game theorist who doesn't know philosophy, but I assure you that it is correct direction to look for what you're interested at here.
You did not correctly understand what I said. I am not saying that hunting babies for sport is immoral because you will get punished for it. I am saying that there isn't any useful knowledge about the statement "hunting babies for sport is bad" that requires a moral framing. Morality is redundant. The fact that you will get punished for hunting babies for sport is just one of the reasons why hunting babies for sport is bad. This is why I gave another example, "Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice". It is likely that you value human lives and would find baby-hunting disgusting. Again, a moral framing wouldn't add anything here. Any other reason for why "hunting babies for sport is bad" that you will come up with using your critical thinking will work without a moral framing.
"there isn't any useful knowledge" "Morality is redundant."
I strongly dispute this statement, and honestly find it baffling that you would claim as such.
The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws/punishment for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.
Your argument has the same structure as saying: "We don't need germ theory. The fact that washing your hands prevents disease is just one reason why you should wash your hands. People socially also find dirty hands disgusting, and avoid you as social punishment. Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing."
But germ theory is precisely why hand-washing prevents disease and why we evolved disgust responses to filth. Calling it "redundant" because we can list its downstream effects without naming it doesn't make the underlying framework unnecessary. It just means you're describing consequences while ignoring their cause. You can't explain why those consequences hold together coherently without it; the justified true belief comes from germ theory! (And don't try to gettier problem me on the concept of knowledge, this applies even if you don't use JTB to define knowledge.)
> “Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing”.
This is factually correct though. However, we have other reasons for positing germ theory. Aside from the fact that it provides a mechanism of action for hand-washing, we have significant evidence that germs do exist and that they do cause disease. However, this doesn’t apply to any moral theory. While germ theory provides us with additional information about why washing hands is good, moral theory fails to provide any kind of e.g. mechanism of action or other knowledge that we wouldn't be able to derive about the statement “hunting babies for sport is bad” without it.
> The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.
You will be punished for murdering babies because it is illegal. That’s just an objective fact about the society that we live in. However, if we are out of reach of the law for whatever reason, people might try to punish us for hunting babies because they were culturally brought up to experience a strong disgust reaction to this activity, as well as because murdering babies marks us as a potentially dangerous individual (in several ways: murdering babies is bad enough, but we are also presumably going against social norms and expectations).
Notably, there were many times in history when baby murder was completely socially acceptable. Child sacrifice is the single most widespread form of human sacrifice in history, and archaeological evidence for it can be found all over the globe. Some scholars interpret some of these instances as simple burials, but there are many cases where sacrifice is the most plausible interpretation. If these people had access to this universal moral axiom that killing babies is bad, why didn’t they derive laws or customs from it that would stop them from sacrificing babies?
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