>I think everyone who has moral or axiological opinions is making the same leap of faith at some point, or else fudging their way around it by conflating the normative and the merely descriptive
This may be right, but we can still notice differences, especially huge ones, and trace back their origins. It actually seems pretty surprising if you and I have wildly, metaphysically disparate values, and at least interesting.
To this end I think it would help if you laid out your own ground-level values, and explained to whatever extent is possible why you hold them (and perhaps in what sense you think they are correct).
I mean, at risk of seeming flippant, I just want to say “basically all the values your ‘real person’ holds”?
Like, it’s just all that stuff we both think is good. Play, life, children, exploration; empowering others to get what they want, and freeing them from pointless suffering; understanding, creating, expressing, communicating, …
I’m just… not doing the last step where I abstract that into a mental state, and then replace it with that mental state. The “correctness” comes from Reason, it’s just that the Reason is applied to more greatly empower me to make the world better, to make tradeoffs and prioritizations, to clarify things, to propagate logical implications… For example, say I have an urge to harm someone. I generally decide to nevertheless not harm them, because I disagree with the intuition. Maybe it was put there by evolution fighting some game I don’t want to fight, maybe it was a traumatic reaction I had to something years ago; anyway, I currently believe the world will be better if I don’t do that. If I harm someone, they’ll be less empowered to get what they want; I’ll less live among people who are getting what they want, and sharing with me; etc.
>I think everyone who has moral or axiological opinions is making the same leap of faith at some point, or else fudging their way around it by conflating the normative and the merely descriptive
This may be right, but we can still notice differences, especially huge ones, and trace back their origins. It actually seems pretty surprising if you and I have wildly, metaphysically disparate values, and at least interesting.
To this end I think it would help if you laid out your own ground-level values, and explained to whatever extent is possible why you hold them (and perhaps in what sense you think they are correct).
I mean, at risk of seeming flippant, I just want to say “basically all the values your ‘real person’ holds”?
Like, it’s just all that stuff we both think is good. Play, life, children, exploration; empowering others to get what they want, and freeing them from pointless suffering; understanding, creating, expressing, communicating, …
I’m just… not doing the last step where I abstract that into a mental state, and then replace it with that mental state. The “correctness” comes from Reason, it’s just that the Reason is applied to more greatly empower me to make the world better, to make tradeoffs and prioritizations, to clarify things, to propagate logical implications… For example, say I have an urge to harm someone. I generally decide to nevertheless not harm them, because I disagree with the intuition. Maybe it was put there by evolution fighting some game I don’t want to fight, maybe it was a traumatic reaction I had to something years ago; anyway, I currently believe the world will be better if I don’t do that. If I harm someone, they’ll be less empowered to get what they want; I’ll less live among people who are getting what they want, and sharing with me; etc.