Subhan: “You’re not escaping that easily! How does a universe in which murder is wrong, differ from a universe in which murder is right? How can you detect the difference experimentally? If the answer to that is ‘No’, then how does any human being come to know that murder is wrong?”
…
Obert: “Because it seems blue, just as murder seems wrong. Just don’t ask me what the sky is, or how I can see it.”
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.
So there is a stronger argument against Obert than the one Subhan makes. It’s not just that we don’t know how we can know about what is right, but rather that we know we can’t know, at least not through these apparent moral perceptions/intuitions.
He does, in fact, point out that if morality came from evolution (which our minds came from evolution, then our moral preferences must have too, so why would evolution coincidentally choose values that correspond to some Universal Imperative?
Subhan: “You’re not escaping that easily! How does a universe in which murder is wrong, differ from a universe in which murder is right? How can you detect the difference experimentally? If the answer to that is ‘No’, then how does any human being come to know that murder is wrong?” … Obert: “Because it seems blue, just as murder seems wrong. Just don’t ask me what the sky is, or how I can see it.”
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.
So there is a stronger argument against Obert than the one Subhan makes. It’s not just that we don’t know how we can know about what is right, but rather that we know we can’t know, at least not through these apparent moral perceptions/intuitions.
He does, in fact, point out that if morality came from evolution (which our minds came from evolution, then our moral preferences must have too, so why would evolution coincidentally choose values that correspond to some Universal Imperative?