Re: Why do you not feel pain upon experiencing taxation?
Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2015 10:10 am
I said I'd try to respond again later, so here we are.
David pointed out that I was wavering in this thread between asserting moral skepticism and trying to make some use of moral language or salvage the terminology by using it to refer to emotional reactions and the tendency of different experiences to cause them. After having read some material on how emotions work in human beings and other animals, and some on meta-ethics, I've decided that whatever thesis I was trying to construct would indeed probably have been a useless one. On the one hand, I underestimated how complicated an issue emotional processes were, on the other my attempt was really one at reforming the language in such a way that it would seem to me to have some actual meaning; most people indeed don't use moral terms the way I was trying to do.
This just leaves me back with moral skepticism. I think David was also right in that discussions like this one inevitably lead to discussions of comparative morality. This leaves me without any motivation to participate in such discussions anymore. So, enjoy being rid of me I guess.
David pointed out that I was wavering in this thread between asserting moral skepticism and trying to make some use of moral language or salvage the terminology by using it to refer to emotional reactions and the tendency of different experiences to cause them. After having read some material on how emotions work in human beings and other animals, and some on meta-ethics, I've decided that whatever thesis I was trying to construct would indeed probably have been a useless one. On the one hand, I underestimated how complicated an issue emotional processes were, on the other my attempt was really one at reforming the language in such a way that it would seem to me to have some actual meaning; most people indeed don't use moral terms the way I was trying to do.
This just leaves me back with moral skepticism. I think David was also right in that discussions like this one inevitably lead to discussions of comparative morality. This leaves me without any motivation to participate in such discussions anymore. So, enjoy being rid of me I guess.