That's because your stated goal is to justify your actions, and I don't see any need for that.
I presume most people act as you say, and don't really rationalize many of their actions, just going "with their gut". However, this framework that I am talking about with fundamental oughts and deriving morality is not just for the individual. It also informs us about lawmaking, and this is where we are necessarily enforcing some common value system on people. So, I argue that you can't escape requiring justification for certain actions, ones where our current system deems it necessary to establish laws.
one is that they are really getting their justifications from their religious doctrine rather than from their heart
In a way, I this is also "from the heart". That is because their faith in the religious doctrine comes from their heart. The morals themselves are externalized, but the problem still lies in "going with the heart". Here it is a contest, "inside the heart", between their instinctive morals and their faith in the religion.
Notice however that the book was written by someone trying to do exactly what you're doing, and codify someone's subjective intuitions into an external system of axioms/laws.
Don't presume to know the motivations of the writers of the religious texts. Furthermore, you have yet to really understand what I am trying to do here, in many aspects. One that I want to clear up, I'm not proposing any kind of "value system imperialism", any more than physicists are imposing "natural law imperialism". I am suggesting only a strictly academic pursuit. Secondly, I am not trying to codify anything that is subjective (in my mind). Of course, since you've declared all values subjective, it seems that way to you. We'll need to get into that later...
And actually, I would argue that anyone who listens to a book of axioms rather than their own conscience, whether that book is written by a religious person or a scientist, is objectively wrong in that they don't understand the source of human values.
You say "THE source of human values". Are you arguing that external sources don't even count now? You seemed to agree earlier that some people are deriving their values directly from a religious text. Besides that, you might be saying that we can objectively show that the PROPER source for values is subjective... that doesn't sound well-defined.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2010-12-05 05:06 pm (UTC)I presume most people act as you say, and don't really rationalize many of their actions, just going "with their gut". However, this framework that I am talking about with fundamental oughts and deriving morality is not just for the individual. It also informs us about lawmaking, and this is where we are necessarily enforcing some common value system on people. So, I argue that you can't escape requiring justification for certain actions, ones where our current system deems it necessary to establish laws.
one is that they are really getting their justifications from their religious doctrine rather than from their heart
In a way, I this is also "from the heart". That is because their faith in the religious doctrine comes from their heart. The morals themselves are externalized, but the problem still lies in "going with the heart". Here it is a contest, "inside the heart", between their instinctive morals and their faith in the religion.
Notice however that the book was written by someone trying to do exactly what you're doing, and codify someone's subjective intuitions into an external system of axioms/laws.
Don't presume to know the motivations of the writers of the religious texts. Furthermore, you have yet to really understand what I am trying to do here, in many aspects. One that I want to clear up, I'm not proposing any kind of "value system imperialism", any more than physicists are imposing "natural law imperialism". I am suggesting only a strictly academic pursuit. Secondly, I am not trying to codify anything that is subjective (in my mind). Of course, since you've declared all values subjective, it seems that way to you. We'll need to get into that later...
And actually, I would argue that anyone who listens to a book of axioms rather than their own conscience, whether that book is written by a religious person or a scientist, is objectively wrong in that they don't understand the source of human values.
You say "THE source of human values". Are you arguing that external sources don't even count now? You seemed to agree earlier that some people are deriving their values directly from a religious text. Besides that, you might be saying that we can objectively show that the PROPER source for values is subjective... that doesn't sound well-defined.