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What words would you use to tell your friends and family about why someone shouldn't stick a gun in your face and take anything they want?

And if the complicated and often contradictory paths through considerations of ethics are 'annoying' to you, why? Are they 'wrong' on some moral plane that 'doesn't exist?'.

Ethics, life, and why we are all here is hard stuff. But if you think there's no point, then please don't vote in the rest of our elections this fall!

> why someone shouldn't stick a gun in your face and take anything they want?

If they're the government, they call that taxation.

It's not wrong to stick a gun in someone's face. It's fine to pull the trigger too, if you're not considering the laws our civilization invented. It's all just opinion: You might not like being robbed, shot, or killed, but that's your opinion; it's not "bad" in any real way whatsoever. I don't like pain or the idea of dying before I'm ready either, but it's not an actual problem or anything like that. Just preference. It would be quite remarkable to somehow violate the way things are. Next time you see someone do something "wrong," or "bad," or "unethical," please try to use your senses to observe the "bad" or "problem" in the situation. Where is it? I'd love to see a picture of a real violation of nature, a real problem.

To your second question, such things are annoying to me because it is my nature to be annoyed by ignorance. Many humans are naturally compelled to seek understanding. There is nothing wrong with ignorance; it's just my nature to find it annoying.

Also, downvoting my comments doesn't make them incorrect.

>It's kind of annoying but cute to see some popular "thinkers" and writers -- fancy-smarty-pants _neuroscientists_ and _atheists_, even -- who actually think morality is real, as though there are actual objective problems out there somewhere. As though you could actually do a "bad thing" or a "good thing."

It seems that you conflate real with "made of molecules".

Things like morals are real in the sense that people agree on them.

Doesn't even have to be all people -- after all some people disagree also for concrete, made of molecules, type of stuff (e.g. a crazy person believing a tree is a demon, or a conspiracy theorist not believing in the moon landing, or a psychotic seeing spiders on his arms, etc.)

And, in that respect, it's quite easy to see that helping an old person who fell down to get up is something good, while raping children is not.

It's not even the case that people will take sides on the matter, the huge majority will agree on both those labels.

>That grinds my gears a little because it's very hypocritical: They'll write an entire book disparaging religious people who believe things without evidence, and they'll write another book on why, according to their pseudoscientific-philosophical horse shit, morality can be "derived from science" [vomit].

You do understand that both your charge against this "hypocrisy" and your disgust at "pseudo-philosophy" is based upon a moral stance, right?

>And, in that respect, it's quite easy to see that helping an old person who fell down to get up is something good, while raping children is not.

I think it's a bit more difficult than that. After all, in many cultures, it's fine to rape children, as long as you rape the right children.

That would only mean that morality is relative across cultures, not that morality doesn't exist within the same culture.

That doesn't really get to the heart of the question, as regards the social psychology of morality: why has some culture arrived to the particular moral notions it teaches and enforces? What properties, objects, or circumstances are they representing?

>why has some culture arrived to the particular moral notions it teaches and enforces?

Based on its history -- and because enough people came to believe that such a moral code promotes its wellbeing and interests better than alternatives.

That is no kind of precise causal explanation.

> Things like morals are real in the sense that people agree on them.

That is sufficient for a cultural relativist. But not for the bulk of moral realists, who want to say that it is possible for whole cultures, or even the human race as a whole to be just wrong about some moral proposition.

It's not even a hypthetical excercise. For example: to the moral realist, branding slavery as being unacceptable was not just a matter of switching from one social convention to another. It was about switching from being wrong (both factually and morally) to being right.

Morality is "real" to the extent that we acknowledge that all humans express (or are capable of expressing) moral intuition. You can't hold the emotion of happiness or the feeling of hunger in your hand, but I would wager that you have strong intuitions about their existence as "real" things.

Utilitarianism isn't the end-all-be-all of moral philosophy. By modern standards, it isn't even particularly popular, compared to hybrid (partially deontological) theories. I think you would also be hard-pressed to find a philosopher who thinks that moral theories can be derived from science alone. Scientific knowledge is often used by philosophers to explain an intuition or support a theory, but few are likely to advocate for cannibalism because we have observed it in other species (and some remote uncontacted groups). That would be an appeal to naturalism or the mere state of things, neither of which is compelling in theories that are meant to explain how we ought to behave.

Thinking about morality as a nonabsolute lands you squarely in the land of relativism. That's a very comfortable place to be, until you meet someone who likes to burn the paws of cats for fun (to borrow Singer's analogy) and have no recourse against their unambiguously immoral behavior.

To wrap up, the goal of moral philosophy is not to "anchor" your preexisting morals and make yourself more comfortable - it is to take (all) moral principles to their logical limits, exploring inconsistencies and gaps that would be unacceptable if applied consistently.

Thanks for the comment. I have to disagree with burning cat paws being unarguably immoral, unless you're talking about a completely fabricated, cognitive, social definition of morality. If you declare, rather arbitrarily, that anything causing pain intentionally for no good reason is in our discussion referred to as "bad" or "immoral," I will agree that burning cat paws is immoral. But that's just a definition we invented; in reality there's no issue with burning cat paws for fun or cutting your fingers off when they get dirty or shooting rockets at the tailgater behind your car. Yeah there's going to be pain involved, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with pain at all.

Consider the following: What type of world would ours be if everybody tortured cats for fun? Intuitively speaking, would that be a "good" world, or at least one that is more "moral" than our current one?

Morality itself may not be universal in the same way that protons and neutrons are - it's unlikely that CERN will ever find a fundamental particle that interacts with humans to produce moral behavior. That being said, it isn't necessarily impossible to conceive of a (universal, consistent, intuitive) code whose rules maximize some moral good[1] (whether that good is pleasure, longevity, number of M&Ms per capita, etc).

We can argue back and forth about whether moral goods are social or universal (I personally think that it depends on the moral good being considered), but neither option seems to detract from the core calculus of moral philosophy - whether or not someone ought to do something. If that fundamental question resonates with you, then you've just made a moral consideration. The trick then is to understand why you've made that consideration, whether or not it is a consistent one, and what first principles inspire it. If you think that question doesn't resonate with you, you might be an amoralist[2].

[1]: I apologize for re-using "good" here - I'm using it in the sense of resources, not the moral sense. In the context of (utilitarian) moral philosophy, moral goods are those resources that we ought to maximize.

[2]: Bernard Williams has written very extensively on amoralism, and particularly on the inconsistencies that amoralists must concede upon being presented with their own behavior. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy and Morality: An Introduction to Ethics both contain great passages/chapters on amoralism and its inviability as a philosophical model.

>For example, I started to see that the notion of "selfhood" was just a social invention or cognitive construct, because I reasoned that we're just perpetually changing aspects of nature, and our separateness is just opinion. So then I wondered how the hell anyone could be deserving of blame or credit if they don't actually exist, or if it was their "former self" who committed the crime, etc.

I have a great rebuttal to that kind of nihilism-- not that you need it anymore. People get weird ideas because they subject about half of the universe to nihilism while forgetting the other half.

If everything is just meaningless matter and meat, then so are ideas like credit and blame. "Blame" is just an abstraction for a class of neural signal configurations. Someone might say that there's nothing "wrong" or "right" when it's all just bullshit atoms, but then there's also nothing "wrong" with thinking right and wrong are real.

These ideas don't need to be somehow universal truths... they just need to help physical systems of matter do the shit that physical systems of matter "want" to do.

I think it's obvious that there's also nothing wrong with thinking that nonexistent things are fundamental aspects of reality. You (not you specifically) can have mental models that are not in line with reality to your heart's content. It's not a problem. Trees and rocks don't know what's going on either.

You sound dismissive and petulant. Objective moral truths have to be real (or at least tractable if you're, e.g., a utilitarian) unless you're willing to make some very dubious concessions, such as: it's not morally and objectively wrong to hurt someone for no good reason.

Of course, some DO make such concessions (Singer being one of them), but I think that's just throwing the baby with the bath water.

> Singer being one of them

Example??

Singer, to defend (late-term) abortion, argues that infants aren't "people", as personhood is a function of quality of life. A baby or toddler, for example has very little quality of life compared to a full-grown adult [1][2].

This is a pretty unintuitive position (and imo wrong), but at least the man takes it to its logical conclusion, so, you know.. respect.

[1] http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1993----.htm

[2] https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/just-being-human-doesnt...

But the reason, to my understanding, why this is important is the cost to bring up a baby that's born with severe mental issues is a lot of money.

Human lives have a cost, it varies a bit on how you measure it, but around $1 million in western countries.

So if the cost to bring up this child is more, you are effectively killing someone.

So by stopping the creation of this costly life society is better off and lives are saved.

Certainly the concept a baby suddenly becomes a life just after being born is very flawed.

So Singer doesn't take the side you believe because he believes life don't exist at that point. He is not arguing for just killing someone.

If you scientifically prove a baby is a person he will change his opinion immediately.

It's NOT objectively wrong to hurt people on a whim! I concede this very easily. It's not dubious whatever. It might be illegal or make you unhappy, but please let me know why this is objectively wrong. Do you think "wrong" is more than a little human symbol referring to a little human opinion? How does hurting someone violate nature? How is it a problem? Are there invisible arrows that point to "bad" things? Do you actually think pain is a fundamental problem? What's "dubious" is thinking there's such thing as an objective "bad" out there somewhere. Go find it and take a picture. Measure it and please document it for the human scientific enterprise because it would be a fascinating (but very disturbing) discovery! I'm not trying to be mean here - I just want more people to realize this. Our society is brainwashed. Nothing matters whatsoever outside of pure opinion, as far as we know. Wake up, people.

Some of your points resonate. But are you saying you choose a definition of "exist" whereby nobody exists?

I'm glad. They are disturbing thoughts at first but then they become profoundly liberating.

The "self" or "ego" is an illusion. It's very challenging to see beyond it when you're raised in the competitive, egocentric America. It's not at all obvious until it hits you.

I'm of course not saying that bodies and brains don't exist, just that they are only subjectively and almost arbitrarily separated from Nature. For example, outside of opinions, people are no more significant as entities than, say, doors. Can't doors be considered walls? Sure; it's an opinion, a name for a fuzzily-defined feature of the world. It's not a special entity in a computer system. Same with "person": It's just a name for a concept we have. It's arbitrarily defined. You could just as easily create a new word, like "personite," and define it to mean what we normally think of as a "person" plus everything in a 10-ft-radius sphere from their nose. It's just like "solar system" - it's almost arbitrarily defined. There's not a hidden sphere delineating solar systems just like there's not a hidden mesh delineating our bodies. We just approximately agreed on these definitions. It's also just like the notion of "alive": there's not a cosmic Boolean keeping track of whether or not an aspect of nature is alive or not; "life" is just a concept we invented, almost arbitrarily defined. As I see it, we're always "dying" in a sense: Are you really the person you were this morning? Can you have a conversation with him? I'm pretty sure he's gone, or in a position along the dimension of time that we can't access from this point in time. The idea that you're in some way the same "person" is an illusion of memory: It's just that a very similar brain has memories of what it was like to experience the world in a very similar body this morning.

So yeah, the thing "my body" refers to certainly exists, but it's not some kind of separate or significant "entity" except within our opinionated minds, perhaps; it's just "what the Cosmos is doing in that general area."

I share that slightly nihilistic vantage point in principle. I don't find it helps make decisions too often. I'm much more helped by thinking I exist, treating existence as a concept, requiring no metaphysics.

Nitpick on "illusion": A map is not an illusion of territory; it's a tool for navigating. Mirages and disappearing coins are illusions, useless for navigation.

Nitpick on "bla bla competitive America": lots of people outside America believe they exist.