Jeffrey Luk's Blog

A topic of debate in metaethics is whether or not we can reduce the notion of goodness into some natural property.  We can say that goodness is something we ought to strive for. But why ought we strive for such a thing? Because it is good? This begs the question -- what makes something good? And so on.  The naturalistic moral realist would define goodness in terms of natural properties. The difficulty in this is escaping the Open Question Argument (OQA) and answering how goodness can possibly be reduced. However, the weakness of non-natural moral realism is in characterizing what goodness is in the first place without being circular.  But what if we are simply redefining the same term over and over again, such that we are creating a tautology? For example, what if the good is equivalent to what we ought to strive for?  It seems that they are ontologically equivalent, and might be used interchangeably. This, I believe, escapes the circularity of non-natural moral real...

 Is as follows:  (1) Choices must always be determined or undetermined.  (2) If a choice is determined, then it is external to the agent. If a choice is undetermined, then it is random.  (3) Therefore, all choices are either dependent on something external to the agent or random.  (4) Libertarian free will is false.  Source incompatiblists about free will would probably deny premise 2. I would need to argue that some choice is determined by the agent themselves, and there is no further reason for that choice rather than the agent. Thus, the source of the choice is the agent, and agent causation follows.  There are several issues with this view. First, is this even coherent?? It denies the principle of sufficient reason. Second, if the substance (an agent) is the same, how can it produce all sorts of things (choices) without changing? If it changes, then that begs the question of what causes the change. 

 From a recent DEI training:  " Belonging: Feeling secure, supported, accepted and included - Ingredient that allows for authenticity - "True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world."  - "True belonging doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are" - Brene Brown  " I am going crazy. I have a feeling most social scientists have read little to no ethics at all. The same can be said about those in the political sciences -- specifically, policy-makers and the like. Most papers in the social sciences are chock full of normative statements that are taken as brute facts. Most policy is consequentialist with little to no restraint or consideration for anything other than bare utilitarianism.  But this isn't the point of this post. I wanted to critique their conception of what authenticity is and should be.  Their initia...