Loving the blog! You deal with philosophical questions that don't seem to be the focus of many other blogs, so it's a refreshing change of pace!
I don't know that I believe in objective moral truths per se, but the fact that there are objective facts about the suffering/pleasure of conscious creatures (even if perhaps there's no empirical way to quantify them) seems to me like all we need to ground what we could call "morality".
To me, suffering (in and of itself) is self-evidently bad and pleasure is (in and of itself) self-evidently good, almost by definition. I think that's all you need to ground objective moral truths. You don't really need any free-floating Laws of Morality on top of that, IMHO.
I like Sam Harris's idea of the "worst possible misery for everyone" (WPMFE) being objectively bad by any reasonable definition of "bad". What sane, non-sociopathic person could disagree with that? Any action that moves us away from the WPMFE is a moral good. Of course, like any moral system, there are lots of details and specific situations that reasonable people can disagree about, but the general framework seems difficult to criticize.
I guess that makes me some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist?
Loving the blog! You deal with philosophical questions that don't seem to be the focus of many other blogs, so it's a refreshing change of pace!
I don't know that I believe in objective moral truths per se, but the fact that there are objective facts about the suffering/pleasure of conscious creatures (even if perhaps there's no empirical way to quantify them) seems to me like all we need to ground what we could call "morality".
To me, suffering (in and of itself) is self-evidently bad and pleasure is (in and of itself) self-evidently good, almost by definition. I think that's all you need to ground objective moral truths. You don't really need any free-floating Laws of Morality on top of that, IMHO.
I like Sam Harris's idea of the "worst possible misery for everyone" (WPMFE) being objectively bad by any reasonable definition of "bad". What sane, non-sociopathic person could disagree with that? Any action that moves us away from the WPMFE is a moral good. Of course, like any moral system, there are lots of details and specific situations that reasonable people can disagree about, but the general framework seems difficult to criticize.
I guess that makes me some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist?