But we already know why murder seems wrong to us. It’s completely explained by a combination of game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics. These explanations screen off our apparent moral perceptions from any other influence. In order words, conditioned on these explanations being true, our moral perceptions are independent of (i.e. uncorrelated with) any possible morality-as-given, even if it were to exist.
Let’s try the argument with mathematics: we know why we think 5 is a prime number. It’s completely explained by our evolution, experiences, and so on. Conditioned on these explanations being true, our mathematical perceptions are independent of mathematical-truth-as-given, even if it were to exist.
The problem is that mathematical-truth-as-given may shape the world and therefore shape our experiences. That is, we may have had the tremendous difficulty we had in factorizing the number 5 precisely because the number 5 is in fact a prime number. So one place where one could critique your argument is in the bit that goes: “conditioned on X being the case, then our beliefs are independent of Y”. The critique is that X may in fact be a consequence of Y, in which case X is itself not independent of Y.
But we already know why murder seems wrong to us. It’s completely explained by a combination of game theory, evolutionary psychology, and memetics. These explanations screen off our apparent moral perceptions from any other influence. In order words, conditioned on these explanations being true, our moral perceptions are independent of (i.e. uncorrelated with) any possible morality-as-given, even if it were to exist.
Let’s try the argument with mathematics: we know why we think 5 is a prime number. It’s completely explained by our evolution, experiences, and so on. Conditioned on these explanations being true, our mathematical perceptions are independent of mathematical-truth-as-given, even if it were to exist.
The problem is that mathematical-truth-as-given may shape the world and therefore shape our experiences. That is, we may have had the tremendous difficulty we had in factorizing the number 5 precisely because the number 5 is in fact a prime number. So one place where one could critique your argument is in the bit that goes: “conditioned on X being the case, then our beliefs are independent of Y”. The critique is that X may in fact be a consequence of Y, in which case X is itself not independent of Y.