Just some thoughts that I wanted to share to see if there's potentially good points to be heard that I don't hear from people I know...
Empathy:
Empathy isn't a form of moral knowledge. It's not even necessarily a way to acquire moral knowledge. Empathy is merely the act of an agent abstractly simulating the feelings of an experience that another agent had based on their limited understanding. You don't *know* what someone else felt just because you can consider it. In fact, you don't *know* what someone else felt even if you went through something very similar. The problem is that:
1. You don't know what's going on in someone else's head even if we humans have many similarities
2. No matter how similar you think an experience is to another, the two are still, in fact, different experiences. They happened at different times, in different places, and the individuals involved were not the same.
This isn't to say that empathy is unimportant. I think it's important in pushing people to treat each other better. My point is merely that it is not a way of knowing or type of knowledge. It can only potentially push one to pursue moral understanding and it isn't even necessarily the only thing that can do that.
Ethics: (I'm going to ignore religion in this not because of controversy but because I think that the things unique to religion, i.e. the supernatural aspect, hold no value in these discussions)
Ethics and morality are two things that kind of bug me to hear people talk about because I think most people don't really think about either much but still act self righteious about it. I think most people view themselves as morally good but I see most people as likely ultimately morally grey. If we could qualitatively assess the consequences of any one person's actions over their life as a rational agent, it becomes clear that this calculation is essentially impossible to do. It also doesn't help that humans are absolutely not objective when it comes to self assessment. If you combine that with the fact that the desire to do good =/= doing good, you find that moral assessments scale incredibly poorly.
Another problem is that a lot of people have this idea that, to be moral, you must follow the crowd and do whatever everyone else in your society is doing. This just makes morality a power game where the majority are mostly gonna cater to themselves. This may be how ethics have always worked and will probably always work (consensus) but conformity is an oppressive grounding for any moral conception (this is made clear just by looking at how the LGBTQ+ community has been treated throughout history). So while you need consensus for any moral framework to work, conformity should not be the basis for the moral framework itself.
This all being said, I think having a good idea of why you hold your moral positions is important because morality has to do with how agents interact. I just think that most people don't know why they hold certain moral positions and just trust their gut or society because they're either disinterested, stupid and arrogant, or intellectually lazy.
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3 years, 11 months ago
12 Jan 2021 19:42 CET
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