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>A Patriarchy military State in modern day would run into the problem of blowing up the very resources it's fighting for.

So if we had enough resources, it would become moral?

Because morality is grounded on freedom, it would be what free people would reasonably agree to. A survival mechanism is amoral; any actions can be justified to survive.

The only way we can judge what is called "sliding down" is by having a certain standard to fall from. The standard is the social contract, its the moral law whether or not its obeyed.

I agree that the social contract will be delegated and I will discuss this more on my substack (I talk about it a bit here)

A Patriarchy military State in modern day would run into the problem of blowing up the very resources it's fighting for.

What is Morality other than a survival mechanism?

Social Contract works great, but unforseen(or ignored) consequences eventually force us to slide down Maslow's Pyramid and resort to force.

Plus, I would argue, that due to humans being Pack Mammals, most will naturally leave the decision making(essentially participation) to delegation during times of plenty, only to be left with poor planning and grift when times change to bad.

The term has a lot of baggage, but it doesn't lead to the conclusion many think it does. Later on in my substack, I'll be making the case for a liberal welfare state with freedom as the foundation.

This appears to be more of a descriptive view, whereas I'm focusing on the normative.

If its just about DNA, you can justify a patriarchal military state that can produce more citizens and conquer more territory. It may be effective at its goal, but its not moral. Morality, meanwhile, would be based on the principles free people would agree to in a social contract.

What I mean is that our freedom is the basis of our moral universe. It determines who is part of that universe and its rules. And its binary (or based on a threshold), whether you are subject to moral rules depend on whether you are free. And moral rules must be created based on what free people would agree to.

This is obviously a very controversial topic and I'll be discussing it much more on my substack. If there are any issues that should be addressed, please let me know so I can write about them.

All free humans would be included in the social contract, and would never agree to the slave owners terms, making their laws unjust. The actual social contract would exclude slavery.

Whether animals are included in our moral universe depends on whether they have a conscious (free) experience.

What I mean by objective duties is that there are moral rules that could not be reasonably rejected and would therefore be a part of the social contract (restrictions on murder, slavery, discrimination etc.). This is in some sense metaphysical and some sense dependent on human nature.

The is-ought problem can't be bridged, however the mere pursuit of normativity is enough for reason to bind an agent's freedom and place them under the moral law. And this moral law is objective. Yet this is the whole mission of my substack, so I'll have much more to say about this.

>We have not lived only to fulfill some ambiguous ”need” for millions of years now.

We all experience a pressure to thrive and survive, i.e., to do what will cause our inclusive thriving and surviving.

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>ethical naturalism and nonmoralism

I looked it up: I think I'm an ethical non-naturalist. We feel we ought to fulfil ethical norms. I make a descriptive ought.

Morality has to evolve from the interplay between the needs and goals of humans, and their social and physical environment. Both of these are factual and non-moral.

I can't comment. The moderator blocked my last response and may even block this one. Not a believer in free speech it seems.

Let's say that there is no free will.

This necessarly means that we are making the statement above only and soley because we are deterministically (or randomly) compelled to do so, and not because of critical thinking and rational choiche.

Ok, fine. So how we determine whether our (100% compelled and coerced) statement is true?

It's no easy. There is no critical thinking left. No proving of persuading people that A is more sound than B, no act of choosing between two or more possibilities.
There are only pre-determined (or random) outcomes. Reality compelling some of us to think A rather than B, or B rather than A.

So, it seems to me, our best and only option is to faithfully believe that reality is (deterministically or randomly) somehow, mysteriously and benevolently forcing us - but not all of us... why? Why are we so blessed? - toward the correct conclusions.

Is this a good scientifical approach?

By objective duties do you mean actually objective (as in, within the fabric of the universe or reality, something totally independent of the observer) as that is what I find objective to mean. Anything else is subjective. If you don't think the is-ought problem can be bridged, I'm confused how you argue the existence of objective duties (and thus an objective morality, if I understand you correctly).

I do agree freedom is a decent word for the concept your describing, but is there nothing else that can be used (e.g. mental freedom, desire freedom/freedom of desires, moral freedom)? I think these would help distinguish it from the regular use of freedom, because you may get a lot of flack from ordinary language philosophers for this usage. I don't think it makes your actual argument weaker, but I do think it weakens your ability to communicate it effectively.

I agree that there is subjective meaning, if what you mean by that is something like this: purpose, or meaning within the world is an arbitrary/human concept, and thus can be nothing else than subjective.

I apologize for using the term glorification, as I don't think you're glorifying freedom any more than utilitarian's glorify utility or virtue ethicists glorify virtues. Maybe "moralize" is a better word, but the "moralization" of some concept is integral to any normative theory. In any case, it isn't an issue, but I was just trying to show that freedom is no more special than utility or virtue in regards to the creation of an ethical theory.

no thanks, the idea of freedom is used to justify all sorts of suffering just as much. i dont get why people want to reduce morality to some oversimplified handful of principles. i dont think they ever fully capture people's ideas of morality

They do feel pain though. Cows are just different organisms. Everything lives and everything dies in a circle of life.

I’m not sure why the choice is framed that way. What about the idea that utility is good because it allows people to exercise more freedom? A utilitarian society would mean people have basic stability and therefore can pursue their own goals without worrying about the risk of losing it all and being discarded.

In the same vein, I’d think a utilitarian would argue that a murderer or tyrant isn’t really practicing utilitarianism.

A ranked-choice multiparty system would surely be more utilitarian— and I’d think we’d all be freer from political extremism. (Especially if you’re gay, trans, first-generation American, Jewish, etc.)

Yeah but the argument gets framed that way.

In the literature this is referred to as the "No False Lemma" solution and while there are potential problems with it, I'd say it's a pretty good solution to the problem.

So what makes one social contract better than another? A bunch of slave-keeping Southerners have a social contract where their freedom is important, but the slaves' freedom isn't. And if you say a contract that includes more people who have freedom is better, then does that directly make factory farming wrong, because the billions of cows, pigs, etc. should have freedom too? Or is there a reason to exclude animals?

I'm not following. If the experience of freedom is the foundation of morality, does it mean that the most moral thing to do would be to create and put all humans into Matrix where each person was given as much freedom as possible in their own private reality?

I argue that there are objective duties and beyond that, there is subjective meaning (post coming, and I'd like your thoughts on it). I'll be making one on freedom as well, where I believe that there are two relevant definitions that need some explaining.

I don't mean to glorify freedom, but to find a proper foundation for ethics. Freedom, I argue, happens to fit the bill. (wait till I write my stuff on reason for glorification of concepts, which has the authority to restrict freedom).

I agree that the is-ought divide cannot be bridged, and I'll try to clarify this view further.

Philosophers have been using words like autonomy, agency, etc. However, I think freedom gets the point across better, despite its baggage.

This post deals with meta-ethics, on what grounds morality itself. I don't agree that its obviously utility to the point of tautology. I make that case herein my "utility coach" thought experiment. There I argue that freedom's value exists beyond utility.

I also address the basis for morality here. Happy to hear your thoughts so I can address them in future posts.

That's, like, "watermelons vs. the color red" - what are you even talking about?

An utility function is little more than a mathematical abstraction that captures already existing preferences. Saying someone "values utility" is tautological. Arguably, being consequentialist is tautological. Perhaps confusingly, "utilitarianism" usually means "you should value other people's values equally", sometimes without the "equally".

Many people have a strong preference for freedom. That's just a fact, something that has to be incorporated whenever you try to calculate someone's preferences/utility function correctly. Keeping these ideas in mind, your post makes little sense.

>Second, utility arises as part of an amoral biological process of evolutionary adaptation. Something amoral cannot create something moral.

That makes "moral" a completely useless word, then. It can't refer to anything, since the planet was 100% amoral at some point in the past.