Leah Libresco’s Superpower Is Provoking Decent Comments Boxers

Leah Libresco’s Superpower Is Provoking Decent Comments Boxers November 12, 2015

I mean the interview itself is really neat, but check out the comments!

The big question I was worried atheism wasn’t going to handle was how I had access to moral law. If eyes respond to light, ears to sound, etc, what is it that conscience responds to? I didn’t think the answer was “nothing in particular” or “cultural norms, which are themselves arbitrary” or something like that. I’d been a moral realist for a long time, thinking of it as being something like math: transcendent, true, beautiful. And no one really goes after mathematicians, demanding they explain how they come to know math! (But math is much more obviously extractable from the physical world that ethics are).

So I kept going round and round the tensions with my Lutheran friend, until he told me to stop summarizing the answers I’d discarded and to try to think about what the answer might be – to think something new, instead of continuing to pick over older ideas.

And that’s when I blurted out, “I don’t know, I guess Morality just loves me or something.”

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