Right, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. I mean, he can only get away with the following because he’s left his terms so fuzzy as to be meaningless:
And if, in the meanwhile, it seems to you like I’ve just proved that there is no morality… well, I haven’t proved any such thing. But, meanwhile, just ask yourself if you might want to help people even if there were no morality. If you find that the answer is yes, then you will later discover that you discovered morality.
That is, one would be upset if I said “there is a God, it’s Maxwell’s Equations!” because the concept of God and the concept of universal physical laws are generally distinct. Likewise, saying “well, morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others” makes a mockery of the word ‘morality.’
I think your interpretation oversimplifies things. He’s not saying “morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others”; he’s rather making the claim (which he defers until later) that what we mean by morality cannot be divorced from contingent human psychology, choices and preferences, and that it’s nonsense to claim “if moral sentiments and principles are contingent on the human brain rather than written into the nature of the universe, then human brains should therefore start acting like their caricatures of ‘immoral’ agents”.
Right, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence. I mean, he can only get away with the following because he’s left his terms so fuzzy as to be meaningless:
That is, one would be upset if I said “there is a God, it’s Maxwell’s Equations!” because the concept of God and the concept of universal physical laws are generally distinct. Likewise, saying “well, morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others” makes a mockery of the word ‘morality.’
I think your interpretation oversimplifies things. He’s not saying “morality is an inborn or taught bland desire to help others”; he’s rather making the claim (which he defers until later) that what we mean by morality cannot be divorced from contingent human psychology, choices and preferences, and that it’s nonsense to claim “if moral sentiments and principles are contingent on the human brain rather than written into the nature of the universe, then human brains should therefore start acting like their caricatures of ‘immoral’ agents”.