Just do what is, ahem, right—to the best of your ability to weigh the arguments you have heard, and ponder the arguments you may not have heard.
What’s “the best of your ability”? ‘Best’ is a determination of quality. What constitutes quality reasoning about ‘morality’?
When we talk about quality reasoning in, say, math, we don’t have problems with that question. We don’t permit just any old argument to be acceptable—if people’s reasoning doesn’t fit certain criteria, we don’t accept that reasoning as valid. That they make the arguments, and that they may able to make only those arguments, is utterly irrelevant. If those are the only arguments they’re capable of making, we say they’re incapable of reasoning about math, we don’t redefine our concept of math to permit their arguments to be sensible.
We have a conceptual box we call ‘morality’. We know that people have mutually contradictory ideas about what sorts of things go in the box. It follows that we can’t resolve the question of what should go in the box by looking at the output of people’s morality evaluations. Those outputs are inconsistent; they can’t proceed from a common set of principles.
So we have to look at the nature of the evaluations, not the output of the evaluations, and determine which outputs are right and which aren’t. Not ‘right’ in the ‘moral’ sense, whatever that is—that would be circular reasoning. We can’t evaluate moral evaluations with moral evaluations. ‘Right’ in the sense that mathematical arguments are right.
What’s “the best of your ability”? ‘Best’ is a determination of quality. What constitutes quality reasoning about ‘morality’?
When we talk about quality reasoning in, say, math, we don’t have problems with that question. We don’t permit just any old argument to be acceptable—if people’s reasoning doesn’t fit certain criteria, we don’t accept that reasoning as valid. That they make the arguments, and that they may able to make only those arguments, is utterly irrelevant. If those are the only arguments they’re capable of making, we say they’re incapable of reasoning about math, we don’t redefine our concept of math to permit their arguments to be sensible.
We have a conceptual box we call ‘morality’. We know that people have mutually contradictory ideas about what sorts of things go in the box. It follows that we can’t resolve the question of what should go in the box by looking at the output of people’s morality evaluations. Those outputs are inconsistent; they can’t proceed from a common set of principles.
So we have to look at the nature of the evaluations, not the output of the evaluations, and determine which outputs are right and which aren’t. Not ‘right’ in the ‘moral’ sense, whatever that is—that would be circular reasoning. We can’t evaluate moral evaluations with moral evaluations. ‘Right’ in the sense that mathematical arguments are right.