How do you know? What even makes you think that “the pink-dotted ball exists”? How did you come to believe this? “What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?”
Notice that in life, unlike in chess, there is no agreed-upon metric for how well you’ve done. It’s not just that we don’t agree on which rule maximizes the expected score at game’s end; we also don’t agree just what exactly constitutes the ‘score’! (For that matter, we don’t even agree on what constitutes “game’s end”…)
In other words, suppose you somehow find the one ball with a pink dot on it. “Eureka!”, you shout, grabbing the ball and turning it around, “Look! The pink dot!”
Whereupon your friend Alice looks at the ball you’re holding and says “Eh? That dot isn’t pink at all. What, are you blind or something? It’s clearly orange.” And your other friend, Bob, asks, confused, “Why are we looking for a pink dot, anyway? It’s a green triangle we should be looking for, isn’t it?”
And so on. In short, ethics (and metaethics) is actually much, much harder than you make it out to be. In fact, it’s about as hard as looking for the proverbial black cat in the dark room…
we also don’t agree just what exactly constitutes the ‘score’!
The number of possible methodologies to maximise something-or-other maybe infinite… but you can still constrain it diwn by taking “moral” to mean something as a qualifier.
How do you know? What even makes you think that “the pink-dotted ball exists”? How did you come to believe this? “What do you think you know, and how do you think you know it?”
Notice that in life, unlike in chess, there is no agreed-upon metric for how well you’ve done. It’s not just that we don’t agree on which rule maximizes the expected score at game’s end; we also don’t agree just what exactly constitutes the ‘score’! (For that matter, we don’t even agree on what constitutes “game’s end”…)
In other words, suppose you somehow find the one ball with a pink dot on it. “Eureka!”, you shout, grabbing the ball and turning it around, “Look! The pink dot!”
Whereupon your friend Alice looks at the ball you’re holding and says “Eh? That dot isn’t pink at all. What, are you blind or something? It’s clearly orange.” And your other friend, Bob, asks, confused, “Why are we looking for a pink dot, anyway? It’s a green triangle we should be looking for, isn’t it?”
And so on. In short, ethics (and metaethics) is actually much, much harder than you make it out to be. In fact, it’s about as hard as looking for the proverbial black cat in the dark room…
The number of possible methodologies to maximise something-or-other maybe infinite… but you can still constrain it diwn by taking “moral” to mean something as a qualifier.