re after years can we say that christian morality is in article r le mlj horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes in article r qp sk squick eitech com ekr squick eitech com eric rescorla writes in article r m r o horus ap mchp sni de frank d s uucp frank o dwyer writes in article qvu jk kyle eitech com ekr kyle eitech com eric rescorla writes if almost all people agree that the sun exists in the usual uncritical sense and almost all people agree that a deal is bad it s a reasonable conclusion that the sun really does exist and that the deal really is bad i disagree completely until rather recently most people did not believe in evolution or the possibility of the atom bomb popular opinion is notoriously wrong about matters of fact true but nevertheless the basis of all matters of fact is overwhelming popular opinion and some overwhelming popular opinion is fact the sun shines if it were not so physics would be a personal matter assumed to be different for each of us there would be yourgravity and mygravity and no theoretical framework to encompass them and predict both this is simply complete nonsense the basis for matters of fact is if any class of opinion the majority of informed popular opinion for some value of informed i would really hate to base my knowledge of for instance qm on what the overwhelming popular opinion is the basis eric is people peering at the world and saying what they see i m talking about uninterpreted facts observations people do those agreement on some observations is a prerequisite for a theory that is more than personal yes that s true but you have to be clear exactly what is an uninterpreted observation it s pretty low level stuff the sun shines is already a lot higher level than that we can agree that i perceive brightness perhaps now i take an experience of good evil to be every bit as raw a fact as an experience of pain or vision that might seem like a good first pass guess but it turns out to be a pretty cruddy way to look at things because we all seem to have rather different opinions experiences about what is good and evil while we seem to be able to agree on what the meter says you re not comparing apples with apples if we all look at the same meter we ll agree if we re all in the same situation that s when we ll agree on fundamental values if at all people who say that nobody agrees on values to the same extent that they agree on trivial observations seem to be unaware of the extent of agreement on either huh what do you mean all in the same situation let s take me and dennis kriz as examples we re in pretty different situations but i think we can agree as to whether it s day or night i don t think we can agree as to whether or not abortion is morally acceptable yet we are certainly in the same difference of situations with respect to each other looks like weasel words to me frank i don t see that it s any evidence at all as i point out above i m really not interested very much in what the popular opinion is i m prepared to trust to some extent the popular opinion about direct matters of physical observation because by and large they accord with my own however if everyone else said the dial read and it looked like a to me i would hope that i would believe myself i e believing other people about these matters seems to have a reasonable probability of predicting what i would believe if i observed myself but the possibility exists that it is not since i know from observation that others disagree with me about what is good i believe i can discount popular opinion about good from the beginning as a predictor of my opinion i would say that the fact that it seems almost impossible to get people to agree on what is good in a really large number of situations is probably the best evidence that objective morality is bogus actually firstly if everyone else said the dial was and i saw i d check my lens prescription that s up to you i guess secondly your observation that people disagree shows nothing people may be looking at different things by virtue of being in different situations if i look at an elephant i ll see an elephant that doesn t imply that you will see an elephant if you look at an iguana this different situations stuff is pretty confusing frank how do we decide if we are in the same situation you mind explaining thirdly i question your assumption that when people disagree about how to achieve fundamental or secondary goals that they therefore do not have the same fundamental goals that seems to be the disagreement you refer to huh i don t think so i think that people disagree about fundamental goals ekr eric rescorla ekr eitech com would you buy used code from this man
