The Enlightenment thinkers proposed that all men should be accorded the Rights of Man. Eventually this assertion of moral universalism would spread to spark campaigns for the legal equality for women, ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and the disabled. Some transhumanists have similarly asserted that a transhuman democracy can ensure the legal equality of ur-human and posthuman citizens, and promote the rights of all persons regardless of species. But respect for diversity and self-determination, an awareness that ethical views are historically situated and not absolute, and the belief that future generations will inevitably develop a new ethics make other transhumanists hostile to the idea of any effort to impose Enlightenment values on other societies, posthumans, or animals. We need to renew our commitment to a subtler, limited form of moral universalism, and to the global political institutions it requires.
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Posted by
Giulio Prisco on 02/10 at 04:44 AM
As the other articles of this series, I think this article offers a measured and balanced presentation of different points of view.
I guess I am a moral relativist in the sense that I don't see why the universe should care about our values. All attempts to derive a "universal morality" from first principles seem to me extremely naive and logically faulty (you cannot derive "ought" from "is"). Science and morality are two very different categories that should not be mixed.
The universe does not care about our values. But
we most certainly should. We have
chosen our own values, which make perfect sense to us, and in this sense we can and should live by and promote them.
Posted by
mjgeddes on 02/13 at 08:14 PM
I wouldn't give up on universal morality grounded in natural law so easily. Guilio, no sensible person tries to construct 'universal morality' from first principles, but instead, fans of natural laws think that empiricism could find evidence for universal morality.
Our conscious feelings supply the 'empirical data' of values, and there may be an 'intuitionist moral sense' through which universal moral truths could be perceived:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_sense_theory
Of course, only minds with a certain minimum amount of 'moral sense' already built-in would be capable of perceiving these moral truths or caring about it.
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I spent years (2002 onwards) shifting through thousands of possibilities and incoherent ideas, around 2006-2007 (or thereabouts) some coherent ideas were starting to crystallize. My current (and likely final) general position is that there's a universal morality based around aesthetics and the creation of beauty (that is, I think, all other values are simply special cases of aesthetics). I far as I can tell, my position is truly original, although Kant did have some ideas vaguely along these ideas.
I think this somehow hooks into science via what is known as Occam's Razor (closely associated with what is known as 'priors' in Bayesian reasoning). I think there exist aesthetic principles for models ('universal priors' in the language of Bayes) which are 'locking in' this universal morality. The justification of following the universal morality is that failure to do so degrades our own cognitive proccesses (aesthetics is closely tied in with quality of consciousnes).
So to sum up, I think the creation of beauty is the meaning of life. Best guess!
Posted by
Giulio Prisco on 02/14 at 04:27 AM
You
think the creation of beauty is the meaning of life. I
think this is beautiful idea. Somebody may
think killing cats and shooting people in the street is the meaning of life.
The universe does not give a damn about what we
think. Giving meaning to our lives is up to us.
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