Bad tactics: mentioning Sam Harris (who got a pretty bad reception here) and choosing somewhat political examples.
I didn’t want to choose issues people already agreed upon or ignored, including Harris himself.
Your point seems so true as to be obvious. …
Have you not had a conversation that was ended or degraded with “Well morality is subjective anyway, this is all a pointless question.”? The goal of the post is to respond as effectively as possible to this disorientation, and unsurprisingly, the most convincing response is an obviously true one… what I’m offering is which obviously true response is most effective. That’s what I was getting at when I wrote
Though perhaps obvious, this idea has some seriously persuasive consequences
I didn’t mean it as a criticism of you—I meant more that I was shocked that people in the comments disagreed with your argument. I mean, no matter how you form your moral values, they’re going to be affected by factual claims, and people will change their opinions on moral issues based on learning new objective facts. Actually, that’s probably the predominant way that people change their minds on moral issues.
“X is good.”
“What’s that? You say X kills vast numbers of people? You have strong evidence for that? Oops, X is bad.”
I didn’t want to choose issues people already agreed upon or ignored, including Harris himself.
Have you not had a conversation that was ended or degraded with “Well morality is subjective anyway, this is all a pointless question.”? The goal of the post is to respond as effectively as possible to this disorientation, and unsurprisingly, the most convincing response is an obviously true one… what I’m offering is which obviously true response is most effective. That’s what I was getting at when I wrote
though maybe I should expand on that in the OP?
I didn’t mean it as a criticism of you—I meant more that I was shocked that people in the comments disagreed with your argument. I mean, no matter how you form your moral values, they’re going to be affected by factual claims, and people will change their opinions on moral issues based on learning new objective facts. Actually, that’s probably the predominant way that people change their minds on moral issues.
“X is good.”
“What’s that? You say X kills vast numbers of people? You have strong evidence for that? Oops, X is bad.”