@celestialmangos8537
I’m not sure if Alex’s views on morality have changed or if he’s just the G.O.A.T at playing devils advocate, but I really loved this vid!!
@person1858
You could easily justify religious intuitions with this as well.
@HawtLS
I hate this argument more than words can describe. It’s essentially “well we can’t prove ANYTHING without intuition, so anything that’s intuitive is on equal ground” 2+2=4 The earth is round Blue is the best color It’s wrong to steal from someone who’s mean Two of these are SUBJECTIVE, and two are OBJECTIVE. Alex doesn’t realize it, but he’s arguing that since we can’t confirm the laws of logic are sound, 2+2=4 is the same as saying blue is the best color. It’s true there are presuppositions we must make. In order to operate in the world we apparently live in, we must assume certain things, like our own existence, is true and objective. This is completely different than presupposing that morality intuitions are objective, or that god exists. Making the smallest presupposition is the best path to truth.
@azerliartock
I have three objections to this. First, we can't just automatically believe every intuition at face value, because down the line these beliefs can contradict each other. You have to make choices. Second, I may have the intuition that "murder is wrong" but I certainly don't have the intuition that "'wrong is wrong' is objectively true". On the contrary, because of my other believes and my world view, my intuition is that "murder is wrong" is subjective. Third, you don't have to reject objective moral facts on the basis of skeptical arguments. And most anti-realists don't. At least I wouldn't. I would give a positive argument for why I think they are subjective rather than objective: I recon that moral facts, values or behaviors seem to be the product of evolution, culture and social interaction as a winning strategy for survival and development. Many species of animals adopt similar strategies of high socialization and low violence. Others don't. Indicating that it's all contingent, and could have been otherwise. And in fact it is otherwise, given the trans-cultural moral differences. From all this I infer that moral facts are subjective. They don't exist out in the space regardless of the existence of subjects that make them up. It would be bizarre to claim that murdering humans is wrong in a Universe where there were no humans. Wrong to whom?
@lllULTIMATEMASTERlll
The difference is that “the earth revolves around the sun” is a coherent idea. “Murder is wrong” needs to be qualified and explained in a coherent way before we can even talk about it being in the same category of unprovable intuitions. Meaning: “wrong” doesn’t have a coherent meaning yet. You need to say what it even is. We know what the earth is and the sun are. We don’t know what “good” or “wrong” are or if they even make sense. I know Alex knows this so I’m hoping the video just didn’t show us enough.
@drixcel2741
“Unprovable intuitions” are called axioms. That’s where the objective science of ethics begins.
@crw1367
Yk u can disagree with destiny and not hate him folks.... this was a respectful and interesting discussion, lets simply critique him, no need to insult him as i see many comments doing
@TheoriginalAndrewHanlon
No, we can objectively test things like the earth orbiting the sun. And yes that test is itself not necessarily objectively true, but the difference is that you couldn't perform any tests on an ethical question that could ever be considered objectively true.
@JM-us3fr
It was a great discussion! I hope you didn’t scare off Destiny from ever coming back lol
@biggieb8900
As pointed out by Sam Harris a long time ago, there's nothing except The Cognito that doesn't rest upon ungrounded axioms. Ethics are as objective as any other topic, including chemistry and physics, all of them rest upon axioms. You hit philosophical bedrock in the hard sciences when you ask if our sense data can be trusted (brain in vat) in the same way as when you question if increasing wellbeing is ethical. The big difference between the hard sciences and ethics is that we are constantly confronted with ethical dilemmas every day that need urgent answers but the consequences are usually unpredictable to us. The hard sciences are a lot more simple usually, and less likely to be encountered by a non-scientist. If you make a claim in the hard sciences, we can easily prove you wrong (given that you accept certain axioms) but it's much harder/not currently possible to prove you wrong with regards to ethics, because that usually involves the mental health of people in the future. Example: you ought to teach your children to read. If you do, they are much more likely to have greater wellbeing in the future, but directly proving that is essentially impossible. The best you could do is point to literacy statistics and how that relates to things like poverty and then relate poverty to self-reported happiness or something. But notice that this is the precise opposite of Hume's guillotine, we can't get an ought without an is...which is to say that we can't make an ethical decision without knowing the actual consequences.
@countryboyred
Define “well-being” Define “good for me” Define “feels good” Define “wrong”
@james13sylar
Another take is that, regardless of it being objective or subjective, civilization couldn't exist of we didn't agree on certain principles of condduct. Most of us like to live on a society, not only it is convenient, most of us will die if we tried to live on our own, quite a lot out of pure loneliness. So we come to agree on these points for our own benefit, and it benefit all of us.
@daddyleon
There's a massive difference between the "intuition" that the sun is going to rise and the sense of moral objectivity. We know the sun exists, we measured what it did before. But the only morality that we can measure is the descriptive kind (sociology, psychology, etc.) not a prescriptive one. So..moral error theory might be right.
@thenerktwins
Alex is fucking smart.
@El-Dorado930
The philosopher David Hume pointed out the difference between factual beliefs and moral beliefs. Factual beliefs are true/false statements. Moral beliefs aren't true/false statements, they are injunctions, a set of rules.
@charliewalker9443
…..because that is not objective? You just said so yourself. Wishing it to be does not make it so.
@genericuser321
In Buddhism, these kinds of discussions are considered "imponderable" or "beyond reason" and you would be advised to steer clear of them. They are an obsessive distraction from what matters to you by making you question what matters at all.
@poljenol6868
Laws of physics do not change per definition. Whether we can reason them is quite irrelevant to their existence.
@Greenwoodland
Taking intro to ethics at 35 in college and it’s working through questions and assumptions I’ve had and giving me a vocabulary to work through, do I believe this or that and why. Really helpful
@danbull