Hilarious debate I discovered combing through the journal of absolute truth, which I use to segue to make a profound point about different philosophical starting points
Interesting! I'm actually in a similar boat as yours, but I actually don't do much normative ethics because of appeal to shaky intuitions ("how big a bullet are you willing to bite?").
I find that metaethics can proceed much further without appeal to ethical intuitions than normative ethics can. This is because many metaethical questions have to do with moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, philosophy of mind, etc.
For example:
-Are moral properties metaphysically queer/strange? Does moral realism require a particular faculty for moral perception? (Mackie)
-Can moral properties be reduced to natural properties? Or what is the relationship between them? (Moral naturalism vs. non-naturalism debate)
-Are moral truths contingent or necessary?
I even find that the two examples that you raise about irrational desires (Future Tuesday indifference) and things that are mind independently bad (infant torture) are less about intuitions and more about arguments (they're conclusions, not starting points), so they can be illuminated by other areas of philosophy in ways that discussions from normative ethics often can't.
Yeah, there are definitely some interesting technical questions about, for example, the queerness of moral facts that don't really appeal to intuitions. However, often even in those cases, intuitions will be involved. There will be an intuitive question about how weird platonism seems, for example.
I think that we can reasonably derive principles in normative ethics, which can be denied in theory, but will be hard to deny, and compare a much wider range of intuitions.
The cases of future tuesday indifference appeal to intuition. I, like many others, have the intuition that one who doesn't care about their suffering on a future tuesday is being irrational.
I think Mackie's argument is not about the intuition of "how weird Platonism seems", but to a background philosophical theory of how the human mind works ("how can human minds acquire moral truths?").
In a similar way, the case of Future Tuesday Indifference appeals to a background theory of rationality (questions such as "Is all rationality instrumental rationality?").
I'm not denying that things might bottom out at intuition at some point. After all, you can keep asking "Why?" questions until your interlocutor is stumped. But stopping at the points that you mention seems to me to give up rational inquiry too early.
If you are not staying your preferences/values/desires with respect to saying "infant torture is bad" what do you mean by "bad"? I have an intuition that I don't want infant torture to occur, but I suspect you are saying you have a different intuition, and I was hoping you could expand.
To me a reason for something to occur is tethered to ones motivations/goals/desires. So something like impartial reason for something to occur doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean by impartial reason?
Then perfectly rational, to me just means acting in perfect accordance with ones beliefs (making valid inferences in regards to them) and heirarchy of desires/preferences/goals. Not sure what you mean by perfectly rational agent. What do you mean?
Interesting! I'm actually in a similar boat as yours, but I actually don't do much normative ethics because of appeal to shaky intuitions ("how big a bullet are you willing to bite?").
I find that metaethics can proceed much further without appeal to ethical intuitions than normative ethics can. This is because many metaethical questions have to do with moral metaphysics, moral epistemology, philosophy of mind, etc.
For example:
-Are moral properties metaphysically queer/strange? Does moral realism require a particular faculty for moral perception? (Mackie)
-Can moral properties be reduced to natural properties? Or what is the relationship between them? (Moral naturalism vs. non-naturalism debate)
-Are moral truths contingent or necessary?
I even find that the two examples that you raise about irrational desires (Future Tuesday indifference) and things that are mind independently bad (infant torture) are less about intuitions and more about arguments (they're conclusions, not starting points), so they can be illuminated by other areas of philosophy in ways that discussions from normative ethics often can't.
Yeah, there are definitely some interesting technical questions about, for example, the queerness of moral facts that don't really appeal to intuitions. However, often even in those cases, intuitions will be involved. There will be an intuitive question about how weird platonism seems, for example.
I think that we can reasonably derive principles in normative ethics, which can be denied in theory, but will be hard to deny, and compare a much wider range of intuitions.
The cases of future tuesday indifference appeal to intuition. I, like many others, have the intuition that one who doesn't care about their suffering on a future tuesday is being irrational.
I think Mackie's argument is not about the intuition of "how weird Platonism seems", but to a background philosophical theory of how the human mind works ("how can human minds acquire moral truths?").
In a similar way, the case of Future Tuesday Indifference appeals to a background theory of rationality (questions such as "Is all rationality instrumental rationality?").
I'm not denying that things might bottom out at intuition at some point. After all, you can keep asking "Why?" questions until your interlocutor is stumped. But stopping at the points that you mention seems to me to give up rational inquiry too early.
If you are not staying your preferences/values/desires with respect to saying "infant torture is bad" what do you mean by "bad"? I have an intuition that I don't want infant torture to occur, but I suspect you are saying you have a different intuition, and I was hoping you could expand.
By bad, I mean we have impartial reason for it not to occur, such that if we were perfectly rational and impartial, we wouldn't torture infants.
To me a reason for something to occur is tethered to ones motivations/goals/desires. So something like impartial reason for something to occur doesn't make any sense to me. What do you mean by impartial reason?
Then perfectly rational, to me just means acting in perfect accordance with ones beliefs (making valid inferences in regards to them) and heirarchy of desires/preferences/goals. Not sure what you mean by perfectly rational agent. What do you mean?
I think reasons count in favor of whatever they're reasons for. For greater clarification of the view, I'd recommend Parfit's "On What Matters"