Do you intend to deny that any purely normative question has any answer beyond a descriptive one about what people of a particular culture (or perhaps, particular people) find intuitive? What about a normative question like "should the observation of ten remissions out of eleven in the treatment group, versus three remissions out of eight in the control group, make us more confident in the claim that the treatment is helpful?" That is a purely normative question. Some people (most scientists and statisticians) have the intuition and/or aesthetic sense that the answer is "yes". Other people (those who are more impressed with anecdotes than statistics) seem to have an intuition that the answer is "no". Are you saying that we can't do anything more than just describe these intuitions? There is nothing to be said in favor of the "yes" answer?
Maybe the questions you pose are questions that we won't be able to answer, but it might just be because they are far too complicated and rely on too much information that we don't really have. Compare - "is Lucy (the individual whose fossilized remains were found in Olduvai Gorge) the ancestor of any currently living individuals?" Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"
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timeasmymeasure
Re: religious darwinists
Date: 2010-10-13 07:43 pm (UTC)Maybe the questions you pose are questions that we won't be able to answer, but it might just be because they are far too complicated and rely on too much information that we don't really have. Compare - "is Lucy (the individual whose fossilized remains were found in Olduvai Gorge) the ancestor of any currently living individuals?" Also, the questions you pose presuppose that the right way to think of morality is in terms of a notion of value of lives - many ethicists argue that actions are the things that are fundamentally right or wrong, rather than deriving their status from a summation of the values of the outcomes. If they're right, then your questions would be like "what is the viscosity of the ether that the earth drags as it orbits the sun?"