TRANSPONDER wrote: ↑Sat May 20, 2023 10:13 pmBroadly, yes, in very succinct term. I might put it this way - people who are really guessing come up with the best (often interim) answers we can, given the level of knowledge at the time, and we are still doing this today. And the people trust what is in the text books. It's just that once, the Holy books were the text books and for some, they still are.
There aren't and can't be any textbooks on morality, not in the way you're talking about. We can discover things, such as the nitrogen cycle and how creatures change over time, and that might (or might not) contradict the stories people use in religion because
why is a huge deal to people.
But we can't discover through observation whether it's right or wrong for Sally to hurt Sammy. No one believes you can't ever hurt someone, and I know pacifists who think cancel culture is the best thing since sliced bread. It's not physical violence, you see, so it's fine. People just differ on their ideas about how you may, and may not, hurt others, and it usually lines up with their competitive strategies being permissible and those of others being out-of-bounds.
Nobody believes you flat-out can't hurt people. And that's probably because it's impossible not to. It's also ruinous to believe you can't hurt others even if it were possible. For example, right now there's a cat in my lap with a minor eye infection, and if I don't put terramycin in his eye twice a day, it will fester and he may lose the eye. He doesn't like it. He struggles. But it's obvious that I must do it anyway. Defining this as "not actually harm" is even worse, since it emboldens moralists to do anything and everything to us, for our own good.
So we make it up and say it has authority. This at least makes it fair. It's why I think the only ultimate truth about morality is that we all have an equal right to do this.
