If you blur the details enough, you can make it look like everyone agrees. That doesn’t mean they really do. For example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that almost every human agrees is good; but suppose you take two different rights from it, and have to make a tradeoff between them. For example, take number 4, which prohibits slavery, and 5, which prohibits torture. You have some resources to spend, and you can either free X slaves or prevent Y instances of torture. What is the ratio of X to Y that makes freeing slaves more worthwhile than preventing torture? You aren’t going to get near-universal agreement on that question, even to within an order of magnitude.
And it’s not just a matter of quibbling details, because the agreement we do have comes from culture and some innate characteristics of humans, which aliens would not necessarily share. The wider the variety of viewpoints you include, the more details you have to blur out. If you include aliens in general, then there will be very little in common. And if you include Clippy, then there will be nothing in common whatsoever.
1) The fact that we do not have a near-universal agreement now does not mean that we won’t have one in future. It also does not mean that there is no one correct answer.
2) What you are saying is that currently we are not very precise, or not as precise as natural science. That doesn’t mean that we are not going to be closer to the correct answer in the future.
3a) Analogously, if we compare different viewpoints about the natural world and looks for the common, then there is also very little we can agree on. Maybe only on a few parameters like colour, form and number. Or even less.
3b) What if there are lifeforms that exist (are evolutionary successful) without any concepts of mathematics and visual perception? What if they have nothing in common wahtsoever with us? Is our physical reality also just as “relative” as our morality?
4) There are differences between the natural world and the normative world. I am certainly not implying that the normative world has the same qualities as the natural world and that you can explore the normative world in the same way as you explore the natural world. So please understand my references to natural science as vague analogies only.
5) You can read my post as a defence for an absolute morality or as an attack against an absolute physical reality. I feel that people on this website are easily ready to attack the notion of an absolute morality, while taking an absolute physical reality as self-evident.
6) Maybe neither the natural world nor the normative world is absolute and as total sceptics, we all become solipsist. But in our everyday life, when we are too busy with the details of life to be sceptic, we subconsciously assume the natural world to be real. In the same way, we can handle the normative world “as if” real, just because its useful and fun.
If you blur the details enough, you can make it look like everyone agrees. That doesn’t mean they really do. For example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights is something that almost every human agrees is good; but suppose you take two different rights from it, and have to make a tradeoff between them. For example, take number 4, which prohibits slavery, and 5, which prohibits torture. You have some resources to spend, and you can either free X slaves or prevent Y instances of torture. What is the ratio of X to Y that makes freeing slaves more worthwhile than preventing torture? You aren’t going to get near-universal agreement on that question, even to within an order of magnitude.
And it’s not just a matter of quibbling details, because the agreement we do have comes from culture and some innate characteristics of humans, which aliens would not necessarily share. The wider the variety of viewpoints you include, the more details you have to blur out. If you include aliens in general, then there will be very little in common. And if you include Clippy, then there will be nothing in common whatsoever.
1) The fact that we do not have a near-universal agreement now does not mean that we won’t have one in future. It also does not mean that there is no one correct answer.
2) What you are saying is that currently we are not very precise, or not as precise as natural science. That doesn’t mean that we are not going to be closer to the correct answer in the future.
3a) Analogously, if we compare different viewpoints about the natural world and looks for the common, then there is also very little we can agree on. Maybe only on a few parameters like colour, form and number. Or even less.
3b) What if there are lifeforms that exist (are evolutionary successful) without any concepts of mathematics and visual perception? What if they have nothing in common wahtsoever with us? Is our physical reality also just as “relative” as our morality?
4) There are differences between the natural world and the normative world. I am certainly not implying that the normative world has the same qualities as the natural world and that you can explore the normative world in the same way as you explore the natural world. So please understand my references to natural science as vague analogies only.
5) You can read my post as a defence for an absolute morality or as an attack against an absolute physical reality. I feel that people on this website are easily ready to attack the notion of an absolute morality, while taking an absolute physical reality as self-evident.
6) Maybe neither the natural world nor the normative world is absolute and as total sceptics, we all become solipsist. But in our everyday life, when we are too busy with the details of life to be sceptic, we subconsciously assume the natural world to be real. In the same way, we can handle the normative world “as if” real, just because its useful and fun.