The Universe Knows Right from Wrong

Maybe im missing it, but the argument seems to be morality is objective because everyone thinks it is. How is that not begging the question?

Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack evidence/argument.

> "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four and it would have been wrong to torture people for fun."

Umm why? That seems non obvious to me.

>"Pleasure is good and suffering is bad because Reality is essentially directed toward the former and away from the latter"

Is it though? And that's ignoring the whole question of wtf does it even mean for reality to be directed in some direction.

> "My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

Umm ok.

>"It is broadly agreed that (all things being equal) pleasure is good and pain is bad..."

Isn't the definition of pleasure, being good. Seems kind of circular - everyone agrees feeling good is good and feeling bad is bad.

>"The reality of objective value is a non-negotiable data-point and we are entitled to make whatever postulations are required to account for it."

'kay then.

> But the problem for .. anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.

What a bizarre argument. Mathematical truths are defined to be true -- entirely the opposite of what the author is trying to claim about moral truths, so this is about as absurd a comparison as one could make.

I'm no expert but this article reads to me like hand-waving psychobabble.

Panpsychism is a pretty interesting idea, but this article does a poor job of explaining it and then making its own moral argument. I'd say skip the article and read this instead:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

One line of argument for panpsychism that I don't often see mentioned is that humans/animals assume that we're the only form of consciousness in the universe. This strikes me as rather myopic, at least as a baseline assumption. It seems like the starting point should be assume that other bodies in the universe are constituted in similar ways and not animals on Earth are exceptionally, unexplainably unique.

I am a believer in a form of panspsychism myself, but this article is baffling.

> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.

The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting axioms...

Here is my take:

All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality.

It might very well be that what we take in from our surroundings and environment isn't an "objective reality", but an incredibly twisted and mangled version which is has more falsehoods, inaccuracies and errors, than any truths. To say that the sky is blue is an incredibly "human" observation, which relies on our eyes having divided the light spectrum into arbitrary ranges we call colors. There is no grounding to distinct colors, other than what our eyes and brain arbitrarily imposes to make sense of what it's taking in. It's a clever, but arbitrary, way to look at the light spectrum.

But we do the best with what we have, there is no point in wallowing in pity, we simply work with the tools we are given. Now, even if we cannot justify it, it does appear to us that murder is morally wrong. We are repulsed by it, we wish to avoid it, we want to minimize it, we label those who do it as being flawed and broken, and we have all sorts of theories and ideas about how murder doesn't fit in with how human life operates.

Even though I cannot point you to any objective anchoring as to why murder is wrong, I can neither point you to any objective anchoring for anything. I cannot prove that what I see, touch, feel, smell and hear is really there, nor that what I am observing is in any way accurate. Even the most basic mathematical facts are suspect, if you can't verify the mental faculties behind it.

So why reject the moral facts I cannot verify, but accept the observable, evidential, mathematical facts that I cannot verify? Who gets to choose which ones gets a pass? I think murder is wrong for the same reason I think the sky is blue: because that's what my senses, body and mind tells me.

Right off the bat it fails epicly in its comparison of Gandhi to Epstein as bastions of good and evil, as apparently the author is completely unaware of Gandhi’s sleeping with children? What a horrible choice for the side of good, given Epstein’s horrendous misdeeds.

What a horribly written horribly reasoned article. Very frustrating to read.

> But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my consciousness is a specific form of that general form of consciousness, it follows that Reality is present within my consciousness.

No it doesn’t follow. You are fully capable of experiencing things that are not reality. That’s just poor reasoning.

I work hard to keep my tone online positive but this article is simply religion presenting itself as science, and it enrages me.

“Arguemnt by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious.” —Mr Dawson, my teacher of Theory of Knowledge (epistemology and critical thinking), circa 1997

So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?

> It might be nice to think that the universe has an inherent moral direction, but do we have any evidence that it does? And if we lack good evidence for these claims, surely respect for Occam’s razor ought to stop us from accepting them? This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value.

So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?

There is an argument for theism that I find very persuasive, which is that, faith is a ridiculous conclusion but a necessary axiom. The point being it's not something you arrive at through reason after ruling out the alternatives, it's just a point you start at, or not.

It's not an artifact of reason, but it's the other way around, where we can only reason about the things the theistic object of faith has caused. (or even just deistic).

Without too much woo, I'm less circumspect about these beliefs, and think we all believe what we respectively perceive we need to. However, something curious I think I may have discovered is that both faith and fear cannot be experienced simultaneously. If this were true, and fear was just an interpretation of an emergent chemical/biological artifact of life in the universe, it implies that something which necessarily extinguished it could also be just as real.

On the question of what is more absurd, belief in the existence of a superbeing we cannot conceive of yet whose will we can somehow divine, or that our reasoning is sufficient to rule out the existence of such a being, if you have ever tried to argue with a dog or a horse or even a baby, the limits of the latter case seem too stark to provide much confidence in their powers.

I tried reading "Mere Christianity" by CS Lewis on the strong recommendation of a friend.

Its core claim is that while many of our ideals of morality shift over time, some are absolute and transcend place and time, and therefore they must have been created by something outside of the universe. That claim occupies only the first few pages, and from there he attempts to further conclude that not only is there something, it is specifically the Christian god.

"(...) consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it (...)". I'm not sure if it means much. It's like saying that spheres prevade universe. Great, now what? Is cat hunting little bird good or bad? Depends who you ask. Consciousness and forms of life in general are recursions where emergent memory and prediction qualifies it on the wide spectrum of sophistication. Natural selection creates unhappy "recursions" from the moment when one eats the other and discovers it gives great energy boost. Feeling pain/pleasure is emergent feature shaped by natural selection. But there is nothing fundamental about it that says good predictors must have it. Evaluating options on more global scale move you closer to more global rights/wrongs, that's all.

Bart Streumer is mentioned in the piece. His book "Unbelievable Errors: An Error Theory about All Normative Judgements" begins with a pretty cool sentence:

> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not be able to convince you that this view is true.

>This objection, though, is jam-packed with value-claims: It claims what we “ought” to believe and references “good” evidence. The very challenge pre-supposes the reality of value.

There's no reason those terms need to be taken as objective. They're as socially constructed as the rest of science and philosophy. We ought to believe things with good evidence because that's what our scientific culture values.

If another culture didn't value that, we'd pity them for being less effective at their goals - it turns out that updating beliefs on evidence makes you more effective. But there's no objective more sense in which they're "bad", they're just less effective.

Grounding a discussion of universal morality in Greek philosophy as a basis for condemning Jeffrey Epstein is a remarkable excercise at ignoring the elephant in the room.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece

(This is not a defence of Epstein but a criticism of the article's argument and coherence.)

I have only a layman's grasp of philosophy. Why doesn't this field challenge its definitions of consciousness more, and why is ethics treated as an axiom? These both seem like anthropocentric positions to me, limiting the discourse. Why can't trees have a conscious experience? And who cares about the morality of a storm cloud?

"We cannot account for necessary truths in terms of things that could have been different. To take Aristotle’s view: We might have evolved to have natures directed toward cruelty. In such a counterfactual scenario, we would have moral grounds for cruelty, which runs counter to our deepest moral convictions. Any view which tries to ground moral truth in things that might have been different is going to face a similar problem. There will be some counterfactual scenario in which the putative ground of morality is absent or points us toward evil rather than the good."

What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood in the abstract, is cruel.

"Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same Reality."

Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of existence that causes them to be, which is God.

"If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths."

The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing.

"My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."

He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why this need to posit necessity?

"Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents."

Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their own good. It is against our own natures to do so.

This part of the universe, me, knows that the article is wrong. So yes. But the same part of the universe also knows that the rest doesn't know shit. No evidence required, you can trust me, I'm from the universe.