Forgive me for being sloppy with my language. Given what I wrote, your objection is entirely reasonable.
The idea that I meant to express is that, while it seems safe to assume that virtually everyone who has ever lived long enough to become a thinking person has encountered some kind of moral question in his life, we cannot say that an appreciable percentage of these people has sat and carefully analyzed these questions.
Even if we restrict ourselves only to people alive today and living in the United States—an enormous restriction considering the perhaps 100 billion people who have lived ever—the population of thousands you point to is pathetically small. Certainly I agree that Socrates, Mill, Kant, & their Merry Band have approached the subject seriously, but beyond these we’ve but a paucity, which I think is truly surprising given the apparent universality of moral experience.
The comparison to studying thermodynamics or logic (perhaps not quite so with logic), is that while we can say that everyone is of course affected by thermodynamics, almost no one attempts to think about it. The effect of thermodynamics on a person’s life is not impacted by that person’s ignorance of thermodynamic laws. However, a huge number of people do attempt to think and talk about morality, and I am not convinced that this latter group does so rigorously or well, which does have a real and critical effect on what morality is in actual practice.
However, I hope you will notice that this is a minor point, and was not a premise to the larger objection I was putting forward.
Forgive me for being sloppy with my language. Given what I wrote, your objection is entirely reasonable.
The idea that I meant to express is that, while it seems safe to assume that virtually everyone who has ever lived long enough to become a thinking person has encountered some kind of moral question in his life, we cannot say that an appreciable percentage of these people has sat and carefully analyzed these questions.
Even if we restrict ourselves only to people alive today and living in the United States—an enormous restriction considering the perhaps 100 billion people who have lived ever—the population of thousands you point to is pathetically small. Certainly I agree that Socrates, Mill, Kant, & their Merry Band have approached the subject seriously, but beyond these we’ve but a paucity, which I think is truly surprising given the apparent universality of moral experience.
The comparison to studying thermodynamics or logic (perhaps not quite so with logic), is that while we can say that everyone is of course affected by thermodynamics, almost no one attempts to think about it. The effect of thermodynamics on a person’s life is not impacted by that person’s ignorance of thermodynamic laws. However, a huge number of people do attempt to think and talk about morality, and I am not convinced that this latter group does so rigorously or well, which does have a real and critical effect on what morality is in actual practice.
However, I hope you will notice that this is a minor point, and was not a premise to the larger objection I was putting forward.