Alright, what was her name?
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
How so? I read your post as not seeing how one could construct a pragmatic case to define causing pain to others as wrong, which I then attempted to do. Did I misread you?
No. I was just making a general comment about how I'm still apparently having a hard time saying what I'm trying to say.
In the absence of an originator external to ourselves, how else can we know that it is universal?
It's like I said before, I can't know for sure if others can feel pain the way I do, but I can know that if they do, it would be wrong for me to inflict it on them. And, also like I said before, that is the foundation, which we then use logic to proceed from (and a reasonably solid logical case can be made to determine that people by and large do feel pain in the same basic way).
I think a big part of the problem we're having is that we don't seem to know what exactly we agree upon. We may have to start some kind of checklist or something. For example, would you accept, for the sake of the discussion, my above statement about pain, so that we can have that as a reference point; or is there something you might dispute about that statement in and of itself, without getting into how we would apply it further?
Well, fortunately, if we take a look at this conception of Univ*, it doesn't make proscriptive pronouncements about human behavior the way other concepts do.
I was just using Univ* as a stand-in. You could substitute anything - Jesus, Jehovah, Ra, the Force, etc. My point is, if it's "moral" to do what a Creator says to do, then you're accepting that there is such a thing as morality, independent of any pragmatic concern.
You also seem to be suggesting that only a universal Creator could be responsible for universal moral law. Maybe that's true, in which case the existence of universal moral law would be evidence of a Creator. But my goal right now is to simply establish that this law exists, and then worry about its implications.
How many societies based upon genocide have lasted and prospered? I'm having trouble thinking of one. It's because people have, at least, some sense of self-preservation that such societies are probably doomed from the beginning.
But is it necessarily a rational sense of self-preservation? What if their policies can make the survivors more resistant to disease, invasion, natural disasters, etc., and that most of the people could see that they had a reasonably good chance of surviving the weeding-out process? Would that then make it right?
And for me to call it wrong, that's why it is critical to define base principles and "rights" from the start. Once we have those in place, we have some basis for saying it's wrong to slaughter Jews, because we recognize their desire to live as overriding someone else's desire to kill them.
How does this constitute even the slightest disagreement with what I've been saying (aside from the fact that these principles and rights have been fairly well recognized for quite some time now)? I mean, aren't you making a rather arbitrary moral judgement here?
I think a big part of the problem we're having is that we don't seem to know what exactly we agree upon. We may have to start some kind of checklist or something. For example, would you accept, for the sake of the discussion, my above statement about pain, so that we can have that as a reference point; or is there something you might dispute about that statement in and of itself, without getting into how we would apply it further?
The question I have to ask about that is your case looks like this. You go from A) "I feel pain," to B) "others feel pain," and then jump right to C) "therefore, it is wrong for me to inflict pain on them." And "why" is the part that's missing. Why is it wrong for you to inflict pain on them?
Because I can make the exact same case, just changing the details a bit, like this: A) I feel happiness, and B) others feel happiness, therefore C) it is wrong for me to make others happy. But I doubt you want to sign up for that particular argument, because we have some sense that pain is wrong, but happiness is (usually) good. So, we need to know why it's wrong to inflict pain on others, but okay to make them happy.
You also seem to be suggesting that only a universal Creator could be responsible for universal moral law. Maybe that's true, in which case the existence of universal moral law would be evidence of a Creator. But my goal right now is to simply establish that this law exists, and then worry about its implications.
Well, it seems to me that the existence of universal moral law certainly implies a universal creator, insofar as the opposite notion does not require one. Maybe you can make the case that universal moral law can exist even in the absence of a creator, which would certainly belie claims to knowing what that law is based on what someone's version of the creator says.
But then we have the problem of parsing out what that universal law is exactly - how do we measure it? How do we observe it? How do we know when we're right or wrong about what it is?
But is it necessarily a rational sense of self-preservation? What if their policies can make the survivors more resistant to disease, invasion, natural disasters, etc., and that most of the people could see that they had a reasonably good chance of surviving the weeding-out process? Would that then make it right?
Ah, but I cleverly anticipated this argument in advance, by suggesting that the ends cannot be used to justify the means. That may be seemingly arbitrary, but there are practical consequences of that decision that I think are generally beneficial.
Keep in mind that an argument from the consequences is only a logical fallacy when you try to use it to argue that something is true, or must be true. IOW, the claim is often advanced that Darwinism cannot be true, since if it were, it would lead to teen abortions, gay marriage, rioting in the streets, and so forth. But this is fallacious - even if all those things are true, and Darwinism inevitably leads to those things, that doesn't affect the truth of it at all.
But, when we're talking about how things should be, how we want society to be, it's perfectly appropriate to evaluate the potential consequences of our decisions. And this is how we would decide which axioms and rights we wanted to base our society on.
How does this constitute even the slightest disagreement with what I've been saying (aside from the fact that these principles and rights have been fairly well recognized for quite some time now)? I mean, aren't you making a rather arbitrary moral judgement here?
Sort of - saying that the Jews preference for life should override is arbitrary in a sense, insofar as we have nothing to hang our hats on to justify that, a priori. But, when we consider the consequences, we have some sparklingly good a posteriori reasons why it should be so. We find that we do not care for the consequences that are likely to ensue if peoples' preference for life is overridden by someone else's desire to kill. So, given the potential negative consequences, we say that this thing is off-limits.
Alright, what was her name?
That's "Mrs. General_re" to you, buddy ;)