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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> As far as I'm concerned, after Wittgenstein, philosophy has had nothing to do. All the "big questions" are either answerable scientifically as a matter of neurology or they're ill-posed and nonsensical.

Science is in the business of answering what is. It can't answer normative questions, i.e. those about what ought to be. That, at the very least, is one of the domains that philosophy is still both sensible and productive.[1]

As others have pointed out below, this article was written from the analytical perspective -- the tradition that stands in contrast to continental thought and critical theory.

[1]: Which is only to say that only a single counterexample is needed to invalidate a claim about "all the big questions." There are plenty of fields besides ethics where philosophy inquiry continues to be relevant and productive.

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I don't think the formal study of ethics is productive either. An ethical system is either descriptive or normative. Does philosophy produce theories that accurately describe human behavior? Psychology and sociology and economics do a much better job of building predictive models.

Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky?

> Does ethical philosophy build normative models that describe what ought to be? Sure. Do these models influence actual human behavior? Not a bit. So why bother building castles in the sky?

Ethical views regarding natural rights are the basis for liberal democracy, either (depending on your metric) the largest or second largest form of political organization today. I'd call that "influencing actual human behavior."

Ethical views regarding harm reduction form the basis of modern medical treatment. "Do no harm" is a normative statement, and I know plenty of doctors who seem to be influenced by it.

These are the simplest of examples. Abrahamic religions encourage their adherents to behave based upon duty, another normative staple. Individuals act based on rational self interest, and a great number of philosophers have argued that they ought to do so. The list goes on.

While we do have an innate model of right and wrong --- a murder taboo is universal amoung human civilizations, for example --- these instincts flow from a long epoch of the influence of evolution and game theory on our psyches, not some grand philosophical system.

Philosophical systems of ethics have always seemed to me like elaborate rationalizations for what we all know to be right and wrong innately. Since most of us possess this faculty with or without philosophy, the formalization is just self-flattery.

Do you think healers sought to do harm before Hippocrates came around and that the mere phrase "do no harm" ushered in a new era of helpful medicine?

> Philosophical systems of ethics have always seemed to me like elaborate rationalizations for what we all know to be right and wrong innately. Since most of us possess this faculty with or without philosophy, the formalization is just self-flattery.

The evidence for this claim is scant: the Ancient Greeks (and not-so-ancient Western Europeans) extolled the virtues of various forms of slavery, all of which we find morally reprehensible today. Moral views of abortion, homosexuality, and blasphemy have all undergone complete reversals in the last 150 years. Intuitionism alone can't account for these changes.

> Do you think healers sought to do harm before Hippocrates came around and that the mere phrase "do no harm" ushered in a new era of helpful medicine?

Hippocrates formalized and systematized what was otherwise a naggling feeling. Just because doctors happened to perform in a morally acceptable fashion pre-oath does not mean that the system prescribed by the oath is redundant -- it serves to establish why certain procedures are right and wrong, when a doctor might be punished or blamed, and so forth.

Why couldn't intuitionism account for these changes? We're drastically changed our environment and increased our prosperity over the past few centuries. It would be amazing if our moral intuition were invariant in the face of changing conditions!

> We're drastically changed our environment and increased our prosperity over the past few centuries. It would be amazing if our moral intuition were invariant in the face of changing conditions!

This is all correct, which is why I said "intuitionism alone". The reason is the absence of a clear causal connection: our (meaning the general public's) moral intuitions have developed in tandem with political and economic progress, not as a cause or purely as a consequence of it. Combined with the massive volume of political and ethical theory produced shortly before the emergence of the world's first liberal democracies, I'm inclined to believe that the causal arrow goes in the other direction than the one you suggest.

>a murder taboo is universal among human civilizations

Using the word murder is cheating. Of course an "unlawful killing" is taboo, it's in the definition! Killing humans is definitely not a universal taboo, just look at wars and those that support them. Since all ethical statements have an evaluative piece to them, we cannot say anything is universally taboo.

Is a murder taboo really universal? Large societies run by death cults have occurred several times throughout history. For example: Carthage, Aztec Empire, ISIL, etc. If you define their actions as not technically "murder" then the word becomes meaningless.

The U.S. Code is essentially a castle in the sky. It's quite useful though.

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