Morals can be axioms, I suppose, but IME what many of us have as object-level “morals” are instead the sorts of cached results that could in principle be derived from axioms. Often, those morals are inconsistent with one another; in those cases using logic and reason to actualize them leads at best to tradeoffs, more often to self-defeating cycles as I switch from one so-called “axiom” to another, sometimes to utter paralysis as these “axioms” come into conflict.
An alternative to that is to analyze my own morality and edit it (insofar as possible) for consistency.
You’re welcome to treat your moral instincts as ineluctable primitives if you wish, of course, but it’s not clear to me that I ought to.
The desire to have a set of morals that derive from consistent axioms can be considered an “ineluctable” as well. It’s simply that your preference to have consistent morals in some cases overrides your other ineluctable preferences...and this conflict is another instance of the paralysis you mentioned.
The morals are indeed cached results...they are the best approximation of the morals that would have been most useful for propagating your genes in the ancestral environment that the combination of evolution and natural selection could come up with.
Morals can be axioms, I suppose, but IME what many of us have as object-level “morals” are instead the sorts of cached results that could in principle be derived from axioms. Often, those morals are inconsistent with one another; in those cases using logic and reason to actualize them leads at best to tradeoffs, more often to self-defeating cycles as I switch from one so-called “axiom” to another, sometimes to utter paralysis as these “axioms” come into conflict.
An alternative to that is to analyze my own morality and edit it (insofar as possible) for consistency.
You’re welcome to treat your moral instincts as ineluctable primitives if you wish, of course, but it’s not clear to me that I ought to.
The desire to have a set of morals that derive from consistent axioms can be considered an “ineluctable” as well. It’s simply that your preference to have consistent morals in some cases overrides your other ineluctable preferences...and this conflict is another instance of the paralysis you mentioned.
The morals are indeed cached results...they are the best approximation of the morals that would have been most useful for propagating your genes in the ancestral environment that the combination of evolution and natural selection could come up with.