brutal
I’m religious but I don’t agree since I view the purpose as things as immanent and over, I think that we all are made of the water of the river that we call purpose and that we can only explore it and find the source if by an atheist view there is any, therefore purpose cannot neither be created nor denied it is in the very nature of things and it is self evident, that’s why you have feelings at all of satisfaction or insatisfaction with yourself therefore to a certain point morality is somewhat already present in the research of happiness, but many might frame this by saying that you can reach a lesser level of suffering by killing yourself obviously I disagree with this too since feelings are a semaphour not the road, if you step out of your car because the light is red you have f up the purpose of driving itself, in the other side I think that atheism doesn’t provide a deeper meaning than this and it doesn’t say that we should see any metaphysical good but only value pro and cons to our innate natural purpose, which at the end can be extracted to the survival and happiness of the self the group and the species etc…
Morality is just how humans live together in society harmoniously.
East Asians aren't Atheist, they are Ancestral/Animist follower
Regarding South Asia, it's complex. If you wanna know DM
Apparently there’s like a billion different religions
The evolutionary explanation of moral instincts doesn’t automatically reduce morality to mere illusion (in the same manner that logic is not an illusion because of evolution). Also, even if humans evolved to favor in-group loyalty, we can rationally extend morality beyond our evolutionary defaults. Ethics is not reducible to evolutionary advantage, and it can be universalized via reason. If ethics were only evolutionary, deliberation itself would be meaningless, because there’d be no justification for choosing one action over another other than personal or tribal advantage. Since we do deliberate meaningfully, in the sense that we can critique, weigh, and universalize moral principles, objective moral truths must exist independently of mere evolutionary convenience.
Even if morality exists, it has to exist independently of god, unless you want to believe that if your god demanded that you chop off part of your penis or rape little boys, it would suddenly be okay because the big jew in the sky with the biggest stick said so.
I already debunked these allegations thoroughly.
EXACTLY
Agreed.
So you assume everyone who uses em dashes must also use AI? That's quite absurd (and also ridiculous, since anyone using an LLM can simply prompt it not to use em-dashes or switch them out). I was already accused of this about 2 months ago, and argued for the integrity of my writings (notes, and even went as far as filming myself writing in third person), then again, you joined only a few weeks ago and are already behaving presumptuously
What AI tracker?I guess my AI tracker can make things easier to determine
I too used to think it could only be used by AI but my keyboard has an option for it if you hold the hyphen button and drag your finger across the screen to the longest line.
—I guess my AI tracker can make things easier to determine
but isnt that the point? if we cant even ask the question of whether morality exists then that already proves we cant perceive it
You can ask that question, which is just an epistemic act, in the same manner that you can ask whether truth exists (which is the essence of performative contradiction, since to debate whether truth exists is to presuppose its existence). Besides, the indispensability argument bypasses perception entirely, though I am unsure of what you even mean by perception.
but that leads to the problem with your first assumption, if evidence is indispensable based on sensory experience then it doesnt provide a framework outside itself, which is the only way we can perceive morality to begin with
indispensability does not say that evidence is grounded in sensory experience alone. It says we are justified in believing in entities or facts that are required for non-optional practices (like deliberation, reasoning, explanation). Sensory experience is one input into those practices, not their ultimate foundation. Logic, truth, reasons, and norms are not themselves sense-data, yet they are indispensable to making sense of sense-data in the first place.
but this already takes on the perspective of morals to begin with, im talking about whether morals provide evidence outside of themself, yes to reason at all would be to assume reason exists but i don't think you're acknowledging the second layer it implies, which is that reason only bases itself on itself
You don't need a god to create a set of rules and prohibitions.
I have a universal rule of golden ethics. Don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you. I won't steal from a store, not because I'm afraid of hell, but because I don't want someone to steal from me.
I don't think any fundamental normative domain provides evidence “outside itself” in the sense you’re demanding, as this seems like an incoherent concept. Reason basing itself on itself just means that reasoning is a precondition for evaluation, not that it arbitrarily asserts its own correctness. You cannot step outside reason to assess reason, because any such assessment would already presuppose it. The same applies to norms. If reason is justified by being unavoidable for thought, then normativity is justified in the same way, since reasoning without norms is impossible. Inference, justification, coherence, and explanation are all norm-governed, hence you cannot remove normativity without undermining reason itself.
No worries bhai majority of people here are. Life made us pessimistic
you're trying to apply the concept of logic itself to the idea it doesnt exist to begin with, it can only exist in a vacuum, like you're saying, but a vacuum needs to exist outside of itself to be proven real
The fact that they cannot be validated from outside only shows that they are preconditions for validation in the first place. Circularity is only vicious when something could have been justified independently; here, independence is impossible in principle. So we are running in circles in the sense that all foundational reasoning is necessarily self-referential, but that isn’t a failure of the argument, but what we should expect when we reach a sort of epistemic bedrock, hence you have the Münchhausen Trilemma. Demanding an external proof at that level just ends with global skepticism, not a specific problem for morality or normativity (especially since the argument of the nihilist is self-contradictory anyway).
Logic is not comparable to ethics, rather ethics itself is the application of logic to primal human intuitions about social conduct. It can appraise and define the characteristics and limits of our moral cognition (this is where logical exercises about morality like the trolley problem come in), but logic cannot assert ethics as an all-binding universal framework.
That's just application of our baseline evolutionary instincts inherited by common evolutionary trajectory (hence seen as "universal" or consistent across cultures) to different environments and conditions.
It is reducible to evolution, for it is just social heuristics even at the most abstracted layers of pure ethics. The universalization of reason by Kant itself stems from the need of humans to be seen as independent agents. It is just projection of something that is internal to our psyche onto the universe, as if desert, guilt or responsibility are properties of the universe itself, instead of emergent tools coming into existence owing to the extremely complex evolution of consciousness itself. You would have to be intellectually blind to not see that "do unto others what you would have be done onto you" is an echo from the herd, a sleight of hand to conceal tribal heuristics as something "transcendental".
Justification itself is convenient fiction.
That's quite a leap. We can only "universalize" a set of moral principles for all rational agents because all rational agents are humans and all humans share a common evolutionary history, pre-inclining them towards similar visceral intuitions. We do unto others what we would have be done unto us because that's how societies worked for hundreds of thousands of years. Any attempt to explain this by some miscellaneous ontology is just intellectual fiction.
Ethical deliberation can transcend our immediate instincts. Humans can reason about moral principles in ways that contradict or extend beyond their base intuitions, hence you have cases where people reject nepotism or tribal favoritism in favor of impartial justice. Just because humans often start from certain intuitions does not mean those intuitions fully determine ethical truth; reason allows us to evaluate and reject instinctive biases. That aside, logic is still susceptible to evolutionary nihilism, as even the value of statements can be seen as human intuition, not access to any objective truth; that line of reasoning is self-defeating and undermines much of our epistemology (aside from certain priori that are detached from reality).
Yet this does not automatically reduce ethical principles to evolutionary convenience. Just as we inherit cognitive capacities through evolution but can reason about mathematics and epistemology beyond immediate survival needs, we can reflect on our moral instincts and identify principles that hold universally, independent of their origin. The universality of certain moral instincts can provide a starting point for reasoning, but reason itself allows us to generalize ethics beyond the constraints of evolutionary history. Evolution gives us the capacity to notice patterns and intuitions, but it does not dictate the limits of moral truth.
Just because a capacity for moral reasoning evolved does not mean that the conclusions it reaches are purely evolutionary conveniences. Also, “do unto others” can be rationally justified beyond mere herd instinct.
Normativity presupposes that agents are capable of understanding and acting on reasons, which is exactly the domain where reason and morality intersect. Social enforcement does not negate moral truth.
Justification is meaningful because agents deliberate about reasons for action. If ethics were purely evolutionary, deliberation itself would be futile, as any choice would be reducible to reproductive or survival advantage. For example, why is the view we ought to value inductive reasoning justified? If justification is fiction then oughts are undermined.
Moral reasoning can systematically critique and defend principles independently of any specific societal or evolutionary advantage.
This assumes that life itself is objectively valuable, but such a statement has to be proven else it is nothing more than a personal opinion.
No such thing as morals there made up.
I basically said the same thing as this
looking back on this you may be right actually, but im not sure if you understood the moral implications of materialism; my point is if the user assumes materialism can be justified they could inadvertently justify nihilism, which cant hold up when you come to the implication value can exist theoretically. so from my perspective it sounds like you're arguing material moral value can exist but that it would have to be in a self justifying way, on which end i would disagree with in its post facto sense.
i would elaborate on this by saying i do believe grounding can be found in the lack of grounding of value itself, as you mentioned with Münchhausen theory, but you would be saying the internal contradiction itself would provide the grounding, which i dont agree with in a material sense, but rather in a post empirical one. the logical implication would not follow as "nihilism assumes nihilism exists, therefore materialism is real" it would follow "nihilism assumes nihilism exist on the basis of materialism, therefore only theoretical value could be applicable"
The indispensability argument does not claim that material moral value exists because of some internal contradiction. If it did, I would agree it is indeed a weak and confused move. The actual point is transcendental, in that certain practices we are already committed to (reasoning, deliberation, explanation) presuppose normative structure. If one participates in those practices at all, he must engage in indispensable deliberation — to even reason about whether materialism is true or not, it requires one to presuppose normative facts about what he ought to believe, thus one is already operating within a normative framework. So the disagreement is not about deriving morality from matter post facto. It’s about what is already presupposed by the activity of giving and asking for reasons.
