Hendy wrote:<\/p>\n
So turn this to morality. What if smoking pot was permissible starting tomorrow. A large number of people would now take part in it while many others would consider to hold it wrong. Are their internal sensors faulty? Repeat this with abortion, nation-wide permissibility of gay marriage, etc. Some would immediately partake and others would still hold that it was wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If the moral sense is a human universal, it would seem that we would line up fairly reasonably on these issues because we\u2019re using an innate human \u201csense\u201d to pick up some objective, external signal of what the morally upright action is.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And Charles replied:<\/p>\n
Hendy, you mix issues that actually have to do with morality with those that don\u2019t. Very few people would argue that smoking pot (privately etc etc) is a moral issue in the same way that abortion is. Abortion is also cloudy because pro-choice folks are not in favor of murder, they just value the fetus less than anti-choice people.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Charles is right. A lot of the disagreement about the moral issues cited above (pot, abortion, etc) are disagreements about the facts of the case, not about how they correspond with morality. I think C.S. Lewis had it right when he said in Mere Christianity<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n
\u201cBut surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things\u2026 There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.\u201d\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Whatever moral frame you subscribe to, and whether or not you believe it is transcendent or absolute, most of your moral heavylifting is still going to come from trying to get a empirical sense of the stakes of whatever you\u2019re dealing with, not from figuring out how they match up to moral behavior. \u00a0I think the most common moral problem we face is the question of how much examination of a choice is necessary to meet a standard of due\u00a0diligence.<\/p>\n
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