Is there any possibility of our brains being wrong?
As I’ve said before I believe that morality is an attempted calculation of our hypothetical preferences about behaviors if we imagined ourselves unbiased and uninvolved. Given this, I believe that we can be wrong about moral matters, when we fail to make this estimation accurately.
But that doesn’t seem to be to what you’re asking. You seem to me to be asking “If our brains’s entire moral mechanism INDEED attempts to calculate our hypothetical preferences about behaviors if we imagined ourselves unbiased and uninvolved, would the mere attempt be somehow epistemically wrong? ”
The answer is obviously no: epistemic errors lies in beliefs, the outcome of calculations. Not in attempted actions, not the attempt of calculations. The question itself is a category error.
If the attempt can go wrong, then we can’t find out what morality is by looking at what our brains do when they make a possibly failed attempt. We would have to look at what they are offering aiming at, what they should be doing. Try as you might, you cannot ignore the normativity of morality (or rationality for that matter).
As I’ve said before I believe that morality is an attempted calculation of our hypothetical preferences about behaviors if we imagined ourselves unbiased and uninvolved. Given this, I believe that we can be wrong about moral matters, when we fail to make this estimation accurately.
But that doesn’t seem to be to what you’re asking. You seem to me to be asking “If our brains’s entire moral mechanism INDEED attempts to calculate our hypothetical preferences about behaviors if we imagined ourselves unbiased and uninvolved, would the mere attempt be somehow epistemically wrong? ”
The answer is obviously no: epistemic errors lies in beliefs, the outcome of calculations. Not in attempted actions, not the attempt of calculations. The question itself is a category error.
If the attempt can go wrong, then we can’t find out what morality is by looking at what our brains do when they make a possibly failed attempt. We would have to look at what they are offering aiming at, what they should be doing. Try as you might, you cannot ignore the normativity of morality (or rationality for that matter).
You didn’t answer my second question.