I don’t think it’s true that if there’s an objective morality, agents necessarily value it whether they realize it or not though. Why couldn’t there be inherently immoral or amoral agents?
… because the whole point of an “objective” morality is that rational agents will update to believe they should follow it? Otherwise we might as easily be such “inherently immoral or amoral agents”, and we wouldn’t want to discover such objective “morality”.
Well, if it turned out that something like “maximize suffering of intelligent agents” were written into the fabric of the universe, I think we’d have to conclude that we were inherently immoral agents.
The same evidence that persuades you that we don’t want to maximize suffering in real life is evidence that it wouldn’t be, I guess.
Side note: I’ve never seen anyone try to defend the position that we should be maximizing suffering, whereas I’ve seen all sorts of eloquent and mutually contradictory defenses of more, um, traditional ethical frameworks.
I’m not saying moral realism is coherent, merely that this objection isn’t.
I don’t think it’s true that if there’s an objective morality, agents necessarily value it whether they realize it or not though. Why couldn’t there be inherently immoral or amoral agents?
… because the whole point of an “objective” morality is that rational agents will update to believe they should follow it? Otherwise we might as easily be such “inherently immoral or amoral agents”, and we wouldn’t want to discover such objective “morality”.
Well, if it turned out that something like “maximize suffering of intelligent agents” were written into the fabric of the universe, I think we’d have to conclude that we were inherently immoral agents.
The same evidence that persuades you that we don’t want to maximize suffering in real life is evidence that it wouldn’t be, I guess.
Side note: I’ve never seen anyone try to defend the position that we should be maximizing suffering, whereas I’ve seen all sorts of eloquent and mutually contradictory defenses of more, um, traditional ethical frameworks.