Comment by jychang
6 hours ago
You're conflating "evidence" for a theory with "what a theory explains". Germ theory provides a unifying framework that explains why hand-washing, sterilization, quarantine, and antibiotics all work, and allows us to predict which novel interventions will succeed; we're not just looking at germs under a fancy microscope. Before germ theory, miasma theory also "worked" in the sense that people could list downstream effects ("bad smells correlate with disease"), but it couldn't generate reliable predictions or explain why certain practices succeeded while others failed!
Moral frameworks function the same way. Without one, you have a disconnected list of "things that provoke disgust" and "things that get you punished"... but no way to reason about novel cases or conflicts between values, or explain why these various intuitions cluster together. Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"? A moral framework provides the structure; raw disgust does not.
For child sacrifice: humans also once believed disease came from evil spirits, that the earth was the center of the universe, that heavier objects fall faster. Does the existence of these errors make physics and biology "redundant frameworks"? Obviously not. it means humans can be wrong, and can reason from false premises. Notice that even cultures practicing child sacrifice typically had strict rules about when, how, and which children could be sacrificed. This suggests they recognized the moral weight of taking a child's life! They just had false beliefs about gods, afterlives, and cosmic bargains that led them to different conclusions. They weren't operating without moral frameworks; they were operating with moral frameworks plus false empirical/metaphysical beliefs.
More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress! If morality is just "what currently provokes disgust," then the abolition of child sacrifice wasn't progress. It was merely a change in fashion, no different from skinny jeans becoming not skinny. But you clearly do think those cultures were wrong (you're citing child sacrifice as a historical horror, not a neutral anthropological curiosity). That normative judgment requires exactly the moral framework you're calling redundant.
Your response seems AI-generated (or significantly AI-”enhanced”), so I’m not going to bother responding to any follow-ups.
> More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress!
I don’t think “moral progress” (or any other kind of “progress”, e.g. “technological progress”) is a meaningful category that needs to be “accounted for”.
> Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"?
I can see “hunting babies” being more acceptable to “torturing prisoners” to many people. Many people don’t consider babies on par with grown-up humans due to their limited neurological development and consciousness. Vice versa, many people find the idea of eating chicken abhorrent and would say that a society of meat-eaters is worse than a thousand Nazi Germanies. This is not a strawman I came up with, I’ve interacted with people who hold this exact opinion, and I think from their perspective it is justified.
> [Without a moral framework you have] no way to reason about novel cases
You can easily reason about novel cases without a moral framework. It just won’t be moral reasoning (which wouldn’t add anything in itself). Is stabbing a robot to death okay? We can think about in terms of how I feel about it. It’s kinda human-shaped, so I’d probably feel a bit weird about it. How would others react to me stabbing it this way? They’d probably feel similarly. Plus, it’s expensive electronics, people don’t like wastefulness. Would it be legal? Probably.
Honestly, yeah. I got lazy with your responses and just threw in a few bullet points to AI, because honestly it's clear you don't know anything about philosophy. It's like arguing code cleaniness with a new software engineer... it was way more tiring than it was intellectually stimulating. You're basically arguing a sort of moral anti-realism perspective but without any actual points like noncognitivism or whatever, because you're saying moral statements are still truth-apt (xyz is bad) but just... don't matter for some reason? It makes no sense.
At least the discussion with skissane was intellectually interesting, so I didn't bother using AI for those comments.
But seriously, you can just throw your entire conversation into AI and ask "who is philosophically and logically correct between these responses". Remove the usernames if you want a fair analysis. Even an obsolete AI like GPT-3.5 will be able to tell you the correct answer for that question. The reasoning is just... soooo obviously... similar to if a senior engineer looked at a junior engineer's code, and facepalmed. It looks like that, but replace "code" with "philosophical logic".
That's the best way I can break it to you, honestly, because it's probably the easiest way for you to get a neutral perspective. I'm genuinely not trying to be biased when I tell you that.
>I got lazy with your responses and just threw in a few bullet points to AI
This should legit be a permabannable offense. That is titanically disrespectful of not just your discussion partner, but of good discussion culture as a whole.
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