Obert: “Why doesn’t their society fall apart in an orgy of mutual killing?”
Subhan: “That doesn’t matter for our purposes of theoretical metaethical investigation. But since you ask, we’ll suppose that the Space Cannibals have a strong sense of honor—they won’t kill someone they promise not to kill; they have a very strong idea that violating an oath is wrong. Their society holds together on that basis, and on the basis of vengeance contracts with private assassination companies. But so far as the actual killing is concerned, the aliens just think it’s fun. When someone gets executed for, say, driving through a traffic light, there’s a bidding war for the rights to personally tear out the offender’s throat.”
Is it likely that Obert actually produced a viable argument ruling out some ethoses that any society might have, on the ground that these ethoses cause any society to destroy itself?
This sounds like an empirical question that would be hard to determine from inside another moral framework. “There’s no way a functioning society could exist where X is part of how they operate, I really think X has insurmountable consequences that would cause a society to destroy itself”. I’m sure that’s true for many values of X, but it seems impossible to judge for non-trivial ones.
Is it likely that Obert actually produced a viable argument ruling out some ethoses that any society might have, on the ground that these ethoses cause any society to destroy itself?
This sounds like an empirical question that would be hard to determine from inside another moral framework. “There’s no way a functioning society could exist where X is part of how they operate, I really think X has insurmountable consequences that would cause a society to destroy itself”. I’m sure that’s true for many values of X, but it seems impossible to judge for non-trivial ones.