Thoughts on Ethics

• Given moral anti-realism, why be moral?
  • Also given moral realism, why be moral?
  • Patrick - skullduggery pleasant, characters know that they are being brainwashed, but they don't care, because they are being brainwashed
    • I am aware that morality is fundamentally arbitrary, but I am still subject to it, and therefore I hold on to it because it's the right thing to do under this arbitrary system
      • floating circle
    • I can't escape the system because I am within the system and the system tells me not to escape
    • I really like this analogy
    • Surely there are some systems like this that we should escape (eg. a cult/brainwashing). What makes morality different?
• Given anti-realism, what do we mean by morality?
  • Moral values are not separate from/ in conflict with non-moral values. Morality is a fuzzy category which we use to categorise the values we already have
    • doesn't feel completely right
      • moral values are the ones I should do?
      • I happen to care about the taste of my food more than the suffering inflicted to a cow that produces the milk, evidenced by the fact I'm not vegan
        • What do we mean by "care about"?
          • How you act and why
        • I could be vegan but I don't want to be
  • Morality is caring about other sentient beings
    • To care about a sentient being is not just to care about their pleasure and pain but also their flourishing
  • Morality is a system based on some hinge propositions
    • "Suffering is bad" is an ethical axiom I take to be true
    • We try to create a system to fit our intuitions, but not overfit
    • Use moral intuitions as datapoints and extrapolate