I gave up on the main issue, and so described my understanding of the reasons that justify giving up.
Sorry. I missed that subtext. Giving up may well be the best course.
your position is that something is meaningless, and mine is that there is a sense behind that, this is a failure of communication.
But my position is not that something (specifically an ‘ought’ statement) is meaningless. I only maintain that the meaning is not attained by assigning “truth value conditions”.
One last attempt …
Your attempt was a step in the right direction, but still IMO still leaves a large gap in understanding. You seem to think that anyone who thinks carefully enough will agree with you that there is some set of core meta-ethical principles that acts as an attractor in a dynamic process of reflective updating.
I disagree with this. There is no core attractor, and the dynamic process is not one of better and better thinking as time goes on. Instead, the dynamics I am talking about is the biological evolutionary process which results in a change over time in the typical human brain. That plus the technological change over time which is likely to bring uploaded humans, AIs, aliens, and “uplifted” non-human animals into our collective social contract.
You seem to think that anyone who thinks carefully enough will agree with you that there is some set of core meta-ethical principles that acts as an attractor in a dynamic process of reflective updating. I disagree with this. There is no core attractor, and the dynamic process is not one of -better and better thinking as time goes on.
How can we know whether that is true or not? If we had access to multiple mature alien races, and could examine their moral systems, that might be a reasonable conclusion—if they were all very different. However, until then, the moral systems we can see are primitive—and any such conclusions would seem to be premature.
Sorry. I missed that subtext. Giving up may well be the best course.
But my position is not that something (specifically an ‘ought’ statement) is meaningless. I only maintain that the meaning is not attained by assigning “truth value conditions”.
Your attempt was a step in the right direction, but still IMO still leaves a large gap in understanding. You seem to think that anyone who thinks carefully enough will agree with you that there is some set of core meta-ethical principles that acts as an attractor in a dynamic process of reflective updating.
I disagree with this. There is no core attractor, and the dynamic process is not one of better and better thinking as time goes on. Instead, the dynamics I am talking about is the biological evolutionary process which results in a change over time in the typical human brain. That plus the technological change over time which is likely to bring uploaded humans, AIs, aliens, and “uplifted” non-human animals into our collective social contract.
How can we know whether that is true or not? If we had access to multiple mature alien races, and could examine their moral systems, that might be a reasonable conclusion—if they were all very different. However, until then, the moral systems we can see are primitive—and any such conclusions would seem to be premature.
I’m sorry. I don’t know which statement you mean to designate by “that”.
Nor do I know which conclusions you worry might be premature.
To the best of my knowledge, I did not draw any conclusions.