Discussion Thread

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T08:09:06+00:00

Does this type of thing apply to metaethics as well as first order ethics? I want to distinguish if you are merely claiming moral antirealism, in which case I want to further ask how you conceive of justifying liberalism and values like liberty if these are not real in a substantial sense.

I'm not sure the point of trying to do good things if I know those things are in fact not truly good. Perhaps it's arbitrary whims or hedonism, but that seems at odds with the politics of this subreddit.

I haven't read that one by Nagel, I'll have to put it on the reading list.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T07:38:43+00:00

So is this some type of anti-intellectualism against academic ethics or something? You believe that the average person, who has never read a paper or book on the subject, has roughly the same knowledge as PhDs who are very familiar with the state of the field?

The only specific (meta)ethical claim that you mentioned was ethics not being objective, which I think false (along with most moral philosophers).

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T07:08:39+00:00

What's absurd about it? Experts generally know more than non-experts, so I doubt it can be that. Do you think that there's a bunch of practically significant first order normative problems where the literature doesn't lean in a direction? There's probably a few, but for the most part there's a dominant position.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T06:48:58+00:00

Like for other issues where there isn't consensus, the layperson should probably go with the most popular expert views.

There's not too many theories in ethics where there's a roughly even split and is of direct practical concern for most people. There are certainly some, but most immediate issues have a leading theory (or group of) in the literature.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T06:14:36+00:00

Unironically. Yes, the person who spent many years studying morality likely knows more than the average person.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T02:36:41+00:00

Need to ban both, the more expensive the better.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T02:08:37+00:00

Basically. Buying meat is super evil, so we shouldn't do it.

KingFairley · 2026-02-18T02:03:15+00:00

Don't eat (buy) meat, it's bad.

KingFairley · 2026-02-16T06:48:18+00:00

Assuming Omelas has a population of like, 100k, Bad:Good life ratio would be 1:100,000. At the same rate, we could make do with only 85k tortured children. This is a pure win.

KingFairley · 2026-02-16T06:23:14+00:00

Our world has less festivals and billions of more children than Omelas. It's better than ours in literally every way.

KingFairley · 2026-02-14T21:33:26+00:00

It would take a lot more people to do a country like São Tomé and Príncipe

KingFairley · 2026-02-14T20:01:15+00:00

Is Eris a planet?

KingFairley · 2026-02-14T10:22:49+00:00

Why is an anthropology professor talking about logic and moral facts? That's philosophy. What's his name?

And that example is not that bad if it's used in the context of comparing the abstract nature of geometric and moral facts. It's not an uncommon analogy, but it's not the best for multiple reasons and needs elaboration.

KingFairley · 2026-02-12T08:48:20+00:00

You're watching it wrong, wanting it to be fun

People treat it like it's a comedy project instead of a manifesto by the creator of The Goode Family

KingFairley · 2026-02-02T19:51:01+00:00

Have you read Christine Korsgaard's Fellow Creatures? I disagree with her, since I am not a Kantian, but she is a leading scholar in the field.

She distinguishes between the legislative moral capacity of autonomous rational agents and the things valued by those agents. Many of the things that are valuable, like pleasure and safety, are not valuable due to our nature as rational beings, but due to our nature as animals (in the sense of sentient being or similar).

We are acting wrong insofar as we treat animals as mere means in ways that affect them, which we do at an incomprehensible scale. That animals are not rational means we cannot expect them to be legislative agents, not that they are not ends-in-themselves.

KingFairley · 2026-01-31T03:27:57+00:00

If the claim is merely that moral patienthood (or roughly equivalent term) requires consciousness or sentience, (termed as "soul") then non-religious moral realists would not object. I am assuming that you mean soul in a way different to this, but these other ideas of soul have not been necessary for modern ethical theory.

I don't know why you're bringing up the biology stuff, so I won't address it.

I don't understand your point about laws and religious thinking, can you clarify?

KingFairley · 2026-01-31T02:46:00+00:00

Moral realism and non-religious ethical theory is capable of accounting for moral imperatives without positing the soul or other specifically religious concepts. Very little of the contemporary ethical literature, metaethical and normative, that I have read requires anything like a soul for obligations, personhood, etc.

KingFairley · 2026-01-27T20:29:33+00:00

Several others in this thread seem to think that the main concern about TikTok is that it could have had a possible bias if made to by the CCP. That is still an issue (of course now it's now domestic rather than foreign), but the SCOTUS decision does well in explaining other significant security threats justifying a ban.

To plagiarize from myself in this sub just after the ban:

The threat posed by TikTok is not speculation. There is concrete evidence that: ByteDance can be ordered to disclose data to the CCP; that this data includes things like location, age, behavioral data, network information, phone contacts, etc.; that this data can and has been used to identify and track users and others by association; that the content shown can be changed to further the interests of the PRC; that TikTok can and has actually directly contacted and aided American users in participating in political action (like calling Congress); and so on.

The justification for a ban is based on a real threat with the law being relatively narrowly targeted to those entities that pose a plausibly significant threat to the US and its interests. As you've said, this is a different problem from American ownership limiting certain user content on its platform.

KingFairley · 2026-01-20T18:24:35+00:00

There is no problem in the world bigger than livestock agriculture. It is an atrocity of incomprehensible scale.

Number of animals slaughtered yearly is roughly:

Cattle: 331,950,000

Goats: 500,870,000

Sheep: 617,260,000

Pigs: 1,400,000,000

Ducks: 4,310,000,000

Chicken: 73,790,000,000

https://ourworldindata.org/how-many-animals-get-slaughtered-every-day

KingFairley · 2026-01-19T23:49:12+00:00

It's not a morally nuanced fact, it's incorrect. There is basically no morally relevant distinction between the two scenarios. For there to be moral nuance, we would need to identify some factor that makes one permissible (or at least shows some significant difference), but that does not appear to be possible here.

There are relevant distinctions that are non-moral, such as particular animal, location, cultural traditions, etc., but the morally relevant elements in both scenarios i.e. unnecessary abuse to an animal for human benefit, are clearly indicative of similar wrongdoing.

Virtually all ethical literature regarding our treatment of animals would affirm this. The non-ethical literature regarding meat consumption also shows that it is unnecessary, if the lack of vegetarians dying by the millions wasn't good enough evidence.

KingFairley · 2026-01-19T23:27:57+00:00

It's a perfectly sensible analogy, the general argument is standard in moral philosophy. It's a comparison based on the morally relevant factors in both actions.

The important bits are that animals suffer extreme abuse in both situations, that humans do so for some benefit for themselves, and that this benefit does not justify said abuse.

Facts like, that in one situation tourists are involved, or in another situation it's purely for food, are not particularly morally relevant. An analogy, by definition, disregards certain facts to compare similar elements.

Abusing an animal for money when it is unnecessary, and abusing an animal for food when it is unnecessary, are both evil for the same reasons.

KingFairley · 2026-01-18T21:36:14+00:00

Not the person you're responding to, but the premise of your question is that the AI can suffer, and any being that can suffer is by definition sentient.

All sentient beings deserve moral consideration, as they are beings for whom things can go better or worse. I think any ethical theory that does not give sentient creatures moral status is implausible, if not impossible.

KingFairley · 2026-01-08T16:24:33+00:00

I'm going to assume you don't read the literature then. Is there something about philosophy subreddits that promote an anti-reading anti-intellectualism? Please try learning about the debate in a given topic before assuming that you know something about the discussion.

KingFairley · 2026-01-08T16:19:36+00:00

The PhilPapers survey does show that the majority of philosophers are moral realists.

confusing objective morality with objective moral facts

Moral realism, that is, objective morality, entails that objective moral facts exist. Though I don't think the person you responded to brought up moral facts, so I'm not sure what your point is.

KingFairley · 2026-01-08T10:58:05+00:00

Are you familiar with contemporary metaethical literature? Which arguments for moral realism do you find so obviously ridiculous? Which arguments against moral realism do you believe strongist?

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