You’re right, I’m concerned with morality as it applies to people generally.
If you are exclusively concerned with sufficiently rational people, then we have indeed been talking past each other. Thanks for clarifying that.
As to your question: I submit that for that community, there are only two principles that matter:
Come to agreement with the rest of the community about how to best optimize your shared environment to satisfy your collective preferences.
Abide by that agreement as long as doing so is in the long-term best interests of everyone you care about.
...and the justification for those principles is fairly self-evident. Perhaps that isn’t a morality, but if it isn’t I’m not sure what use that community would have for a morality in the first place. So I say: either of course there is, or there’s no reason to care.
The specifics of that agreement will, of course, depend on the particular interests of the people involved, and will therefore change regularly. There’s no way to build that without actually knowing about the specific community at a specific point in time. But that’s just implementation. It’s like the difference between believing it’s right to not let someone die, and actually having the medical knowledge to save them.
That said, if this community is restricted to people who, as you implied earlier, care only for rationality, then the resulting agreement process is pretty simple. (If they invite people who also care for other things, it will get more complex.)
You’re right, I’m concerned with morality as it applies to people generally.
If you are exclusively concerned with sufficiently rational people, then we have indeed been talking past each other. Thanks for clarifying that.
As to your question: I submit that for that community, there are only two principles that matter:
Come to agreement with the rest of the community about how to best optimize your shared environment to satisfy your collective preferences.
Abide by that agreement as long as doing so is in the long-term best interests of everyone you care about.
...and the justification for those principles is fairly self-evident. Perhaps that isn’t a morality, but if it isn’t I’m not sure what use that community would have for a morality in the first place. So I say: either of course there is, or there’s no reason to care.
The specifics of that agreement will, of course, depend on the particular interests of the people involved, and will therefore change regularly. There’s no way to build that without actually knowing about the specific community at a specific point in time. But that’s just implementation. It’s like the difference between believing it’s right to not let someone die, and actually having the medical knowledge to save them.
That said, if this community is restricted to people who, as you implied earlier, care only for rationality, then the resulting agreement process is pretty simple. (If they invite people who also care for other things, it will get more complex.)
Very well put.