You're right you know, moral rules have exceptions but don't forget rules come first and exceptions later by which I mean all attempts at formulating moral codes are meant to be universal and that, as we all know, is impossible without convergence of moral values.

I don't see those as exceptions, I see them as fundamental disagreements. Ghandi, certain Buddhists, MLK, Quakers have fundamental disagreement around violence and killing. It's not an exception, it's across the board. Deontologists vs. consuentialists have fundamental disagreements. IOW it is for many Ds not possible to justify killling certain people regardless of the consequences. Whereas Cs can accept killing if in the end it leads to less innocent people dying. There are fundamental disagreements about what is a person, what is innocent and then how to prioritize various 'things we want to avoid or attain..'

And by what standard, pray tell, do you judge the reliability of your system of morality? — SophistiCat

Short answer: Same way I judge the reliability of science.

Long answer is about 80,000 words if you care to read it. You could start here for just the objectivity part or the last section of this for a general overview. — Pfhorrest

Yes, I understand that you have some pet utilitarian system, but this doesn't really answer the question. If my system of morality prescribes maximizing the amount of Chinese fortune cookies in the world, the reliability of this system qua moral system will not be judged by its own criteria of success, i.e. by the amount of Chinese fortune cookies.

This was a trick question, of course. The criteria of success for a system of ethics themselves belong in the ethical category. You have to have ethical judgment before you can judge a system of ethics. But if you already have ethical judgment, then what need is for a system?

Yes, I understand that you have some pet utilitarian system — SophistiCat

It's not utilitarianism.

The criteria of success for a system of ethics themselves belong in the ethical category. You have to have ethical judgment before you can judge a system of ethics. But if you already have ethical judgment, then what need is for a system? — SophistiCat

Do the criteria of success for a system of science themselves belong in the science category? Must you have a scientific judgment before you can judge a system of science?

No. Same with ethics. We do philosophy to figure out what we're trying to accomplish with an epistemological method like that of science, and how to best accomplish that. We don't use science itself to judge the methods of science. Likewise, we can do philosophy to figure out what we're trying to accomplish with an ethical system, and how to best accomplish that. We can't use the ethical system itself to judge its own methods.

I don't see those as exceptions, I see them as fundamental disagreements. Ghandi, certain Buddhists, MLK, Quakers have fundamental disagreement around violence and killing. It's not an exception, it's across the board. Deontologists vs. consuentialists have fundamental disagreements. IOW it is for many Ds not possible to justify killling certain people regardless of the consequences. Whereas Cs can accept killing if in the end it leads to less innocent people dying. There are fundamental disagreements about what is a person, what is innocent and then how to prioritize various 'things we want to avoid or attain..' — Coben

Fundamental disagreements? Maybe you're right but let's look at the situation of one person killing another. A fundamental disagreement in my view would be if one moral theory permitted it and the other prohibited it for all cases. The examples you mention where there are disagreements between moral theories are a few cases, not all; hence these are exceptions not fundamental disagreements.

Well, with that definition of fundamental, yes, it's not fundamental,with most other current cultures. I just look out at a world no where near agreement on a wide range of issues and that includes around killing. I don't see convergence on a wide range of issues - and on many killing related issues as remotely close, because what I would call fundamental moral differences exist. Ones that cannot be reasoned away. IOW one cannot argue that really you and I want the same thing, we just have different means. Let me show you how my means are more effective in getting what we want.

To me the following quote, which sent us along this line, is Pollyanish....

In this discussion of morality, the definition of subjectivity that I'm concerned about is the one that asserts that morality is opinion, feelings, taste and hence doesn't lead to objective moral truths. As I said before even if morality is about personal feelings, so subjective, the causal patterns in re these feelings are sufficiently generalizable, i.e. the causes of happiness and sorrow seem to be similar for all people irrespective of cultural, social, economic, variations, that it allows us to be rational about what must follow thereof; in other words, we can be objective about what sort of moral theory is consistent with, morality's essence, our feelings. For example, there's a universal dislike for murder - we feel offended by it - and this can be the basis of the objective moral truth thou shalt not kill. — TheMadFool

I don't see people having similar reactions to all sorts of types of killing and violence in general. I see this as part of enormous intractable divides around war, abortion, home as castle right to kill intruders, regarding society care for its poor, in relation to medical care, in what is allowed in terms of intelligence services behavior, in what justifies a killing in the courts, in what police are allowed to do in terms of violence and more. I see groups that are not offended by killings that other other people are and that this is regular and even correlates with things like Trump supporters vs. Trump haters. It also correlates with laws in different countries, even within Western nations - Scandanavia vs. US, for example, around a wide range of potential killings.

It's good you clarified what you meant by fundamental. But when I read the above I feel like you are glossing over how deep this divide goes, whether we call a divide at that depth fundamental or not. I do not see a common base that we can then simply use deduction to help the difference converge. I think we have a fundamental bunch of divides that mean that people react quite differently to the same events.

Do the criteria of success for a system of science themselves belong in the science category? Must you have a scientific judgment before you can judge a system of science?

No. Same with ethics. — Pfhorrest

You are right about science, of course, but wrong about ethics. Whether ethical principles are right or wrong is an ethical question - a redundant one, of course, which was my point. You can evaluate ethical systems by other criteria, but the most important criterion for ethical principles is their moral truth - and that judgement cannot be subordinated to philosophy or science or anything that is not ethics.

The definition of fundamental disagreement really doesn't matter. I would like only for you to see that the differences you mention between moral traditions are nothing more than exceptions to a general rule that has a home in all moral theories. Take your example of honor killings, killing in self-defense. Clearly these are situations where the moral rule not to kill is suspended because of one reason or another. In other words such differences can be validly phrased in the form: don't do D except if x, y, z... The differences x, y, z vary among cultures and religions and other relevant parameters: for instance it's permissible to kill your daughter in Pakistan if your family's "honor" is at stake but this would be laughed at in the US. As this example should elucidate, there's an agreement or convergence in don't do D which is what we should appreciate; the differences in the exceptions (x, y, z) are expected because cultures have different values. In short the differences you cite are restricted to what qualifies as an exception to a moral rule, expressed in don't do D, which seems to be approaching a set of universally acceptable set of moral norms.

It's somewhat like thinking that there's no agreement between the Saudis and Americans on the belief that we should work except on holidays just because holiday for the former is on Friday and for the latter is on Sunday

Whether ethical principles are right or wrong is an ethical question — SophistiCat

No, it's a meta-ethical question. Just like the foundations of the physical sciences are found in answers to meta-physical questions (broadly, including epistemology in there).

Whether or not there are correct answers to either type of question, what criteria to use to judge potential answers to either type of question, what methodology to use to apply those criteria, what each type of question even means, and so on, are all questions a level of abstraction away from those questions themselves.

No, it's a meta-ethical question. Just like the foundations of the physical sciences are found in answers to meta-physical questions (broadly, including epistemology in there). — Pfhorrest

The relationship of science and philosophy is a complex one. Philosophy can and does take science as an object of study, just like anything else, but its prescriptive role is very limited. I personally believe that there can be some fruitful cross-pollination between science and philosophy, but it would be the height of hubris to think that science is principally guided by philosophical doctrines, other than the ones that emerged organically in the course of its own development.

The situation with ethics is different though. You can think up metaphysical interpretations and epistemological models, you can package ethics into systems - all as part of the descriptive program of philosophy. But philosophy has no prescriptive role to play with respect to ethics, because at the end of the day, the question that ethics is answering is what one ought to do. Ought questions cannot be decided by anything other than moral judgement. They are like the universal acid: any philosophy that you throw at them will be cut through to the foundation by this stubborn ought: Why ought this be so?

to think that science is principally guided by philosophical doctrines, other than the ones that emerged organically in the course of its own development. — SophistiCat

Why do those ones deserve an exception?

The physical sciences we have today began as a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy", that pretty much solved its foundational questions and then went on to do the business of applying them.

There is no reason to think that moral philosophy cannot do the same thing, solve those foundational questions, and go on to start doing ethical sciences by applying those.

Why do those ones deserve an exception?

The physical sciences we have today began as a branch of philosophy, "natural philosophy", that pretty much solved its foundational questions and then went on to do the business of applying them. — Pfhorrest

Science didn't wait around for its foundational questions to be solved before it could get off the ground - if it did, it would have been waiting to this day. Historical nomenclature aside, what we today recognize as science came together haphazardly as a living practice, rather than as a systematic application of a fully developed philosophical program. If anything, metaphysics and epistemology have for the most part been playing catch-up to science, taking its practice and its findings as a subject of study.

There is no reason to think that moral philosophy cannot do the same thing, solve those foundational questions, and go on to start doing ethical sciences by applying those. — Pfhorrest

Well, since in truth nothing in history has followed this path, then there is nothing for moral philosophy to imitate here.

Science didn't wait around for its foundational questions to be solved before it could get off the ground - if it did, it would have been waiting to this day. Historical nomenclature aside, what we today recognize as science came together haphazardly as a living practice, rather than as a systematic application of a fully developed philosophical program. If anything, metaphysics and epistemology have for the most part been playing catch-up to science, taking its practice and its findings as a subject of study. — SophistiCat

It is impossible to do science without agreement on foundational things like empiricism and realism and some form of rationalism (as in rejecting appeals to intuition, authority, etc). Those practicing scientists may not have all made explicit their philosophical assumptions, but the work they did as a community had to take them for granted; those who continued to dispute those principles did not become part of the scientific community, but instead became its opponents, disputing its results on what scientists consider fallacious philosophical grounds. Because those scientists had at least an implicit philosophical framework in common.

Moral philosophy has slowly been making organic progress in a similar direction. Utilitarianism’s emphasis on hedonic flourishing mirrors the emphasis on empiricism. Deontological and rights-based models mirror the emphasis on rationalism. All of them generally reject appeals to authority and such. Liberty and equality are more valued now than historically. There is a clear trend of moral thinking moving toward a more “scientific” methodology based on common experience and critical reasoning, we just haven’t fully developed a consensus on how exactly those principles all fit together yet.

It is impossible to do science without agreement on foundational things like empiricism and realism and some form of rationalism (as in rejecting appeals to intuition, authority, etc). Those practicing scientists may not have all made explicit their philosophical assumptions, but the work they did as a community had to take them for granted; those who continued to dispute those principles did not become part of the scientific community, but instead became its opponents, disputing its results on what scientists consider fallacious philosophical grounds. Because those scientists had at least an implicit philosophical framework in common. — Pfhorrest

You are conflating actual practice with its philosophical interpretations. Science is done the way it is done not because scientists have come to an agreement about its philosophical foundations (even the philosophical community is far from such an agreement), but because science is a fairly distinctive enterprise and there is a particular way in which it is practiced, which scientists learn in the course of their training. This is not to say that science is a game with arbitrary rules institutionalized by tradition. I believe that modern science is a product of cultural evolution, the seed of which is just our instinctive way of understanding our environment, one which we practice on an everyday basis. Moreover, the weightiest normative criteria in science - closeness of fit and parsimony - are objective to an extent that few other activities can boast (which partly explains the trust that we put in science). It is because science is constrained between its determinate natural origins and its semi-determinate goals that we think we can retrofit it with determinate philosophical foundations.

Which leads us to the contrast case: morality. On the one hand, morality, like science, has deep evolutionary, cultural, social and psychological roots, which makes it fairly determinate and eminently suitable as an object of study. But the other, normative end does not hold up, because of course morality is itself normative. This immediately short-circuits any question about what ought to be moral - what ought to be moral is what is moral, duh!

There is a clear trend of moral thinking moving toward a more “scientific” methodology based on common experience and critical reasoning, we just haven’t fully developed a consensus on how exactly those principles all fit together yet. — Pfhorrest

Yeah, this is just cargo cult science, I am afraid. There is a science for everything nowadays (or rather since the Enlightenment), so there must be a science of morality! Never mind that it makes no sense - to be intellectually respectable it gotta look like science.

Science is done the way it is done not because scientists have come to an agreement about its philosophical foundations (even the philosophical community is far from such an agreement) — SophistiCat

The scientists don't have to explicitly elucidate the principles for it to be evident that they have agreed upon them; and the philosophical community don't have to agree on everything that they explicitly elucidate about those principles for there to be agreement on a common core of them. Try appealing to authority in a scientific paper, like "the Bible says...". Try appealing to some completely unobservable-in-principle phenomenon as evidence (not an as-yet-observed phenomenon as explanation for an observed one). Try suggesting that maybe there isn't actually any objective truth about reality, and local opinion is all that constitutes truth, so inside the headquarters of the Flat Earth Society the world (all of it) actually is flat, even though as soon as you step outside it goes back to being round (everywhere, even inside there) again. There are broad philosophical assumptions that all scientists make, like (as I said) realism, empiricism, and some kind of rationalism, and if you try to forward an argument that doesn't take those for granted, scientists will reject it because of that.

All we need for an "ethical science" is that kind of broad agreement. Rational appeals to evidence only, no authority, no popularity, no intuition. Evidence based on experience, i.e. hedonism. Objectivism in the sense of universalism, contra relativism, to quote Chomsky:

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others—more stringent ones, in fact—plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil. — Chomsky

All we need for an "ethical science" is that kind of broad agreement. — Pfhorrest

Why do we need an "ethical science"? You never stop to ask yourself this question. This is cargo cult.

The function of any kind of science is to reliably and methodically find answers to some kind of question. If you cannot see the utility of having some way of reliably and methodically finding answers to questions about morality, then you've apparently just given up hope.

"Methodically" is the key word here. Yes, you have a method, but that's not enough to qualify as "science." If you don't understand why you do what you do, then your method is no more scientific than astrology or divination.

If you don't understand why you do what you do — SophistiCat

What suggests that I don't?

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? How do you jump the is-ought gap?

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? How do you jump the is-ought gap? — SophistiCat

No system of morality owns morality. Of course the followers and advocates of theists systems believe and advocate that moral truths come from gods, which can be shot down in a few good arguments, as easily as the morality as viewd to be such by secular schools of thoughts.

What I am trying to say is that you CAN'T ask yourself, nobody can, what any of anything has to do with being moral. Once you ask that question, you're lost. So why blame the builders of optimized utilitarianism, when the same question can't be answered with a satisfactorily delimiting definition by anyone else, either?

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others — Chomsky

Ah. Noam Chompsky.

The minimal moral level as stated by him can be argued against, too.

Take the persona of a state executioner. A person who kills people who have been condemned to death by the court systems.

Does he or she practice what he preaches against? Is he or she immoral?

Or take the case of a collaborator against Nazi oppression. Does his or her lying make him or her amoral?

Chompsky ought to have known better. But he does not.

He's one of my pet idiots, like Immanuel Kant.

I seem to be arguing against defining morals as science, but there is another approach that makes that possible. I can't describe it here, as it merits publication, which I can't expedite, since I don't have a doctorate or masters in philosophy, so editors of scientific and professional / academic journals will outright reject my manuscript.

Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to do with being moral. — SophistiCat

What do you even mean by "being moral"? That is the first metaethical question to ask, what claims that something is or isn't moral even mean, and that's one that I do answer, before I even begin approaching the other questions.

What are the criteria of success (other than aping the superficial trappings of science)? — SophistiCat

The criteria for the success of what? A moral science, or generally any system of morality? The criteria for success of those things is to provide a means of answering questions about morality. When someone wonders what is moral, how do they figure it out? When two people disagree about what is moral, how do they resolve those difference? Answering how to do that, how to figure out those answers to questions about morality, is the criteria for the success of a system of morality.

"You can't do that, so don't try" is one proposed "solution".

"Just do whatever [God/the State/etc] says" is another.

I think it's easy to show that neither of those proposals actually works, and rejecting them both and working with whatever's left is where I begin my project.

How do you jump the is-ought gap? — SophistiCat

That you think I'm even trying to do that shows you haven't understood a word that I've said so far. I'm staying entirely within "ought", starting from "ought" and following to "ought", just proceeding in a way analogous to the ways we've been successful at starting with "is" and following to "is".

(I predict you'd respond here "aha! So you're starting with a system of morality already, your 'ought' premises, just like I said!" But no, no more than the physical sciences start with some set of unquestionable "is" premises. The physical sciences start with uncertain "is" hypotheses and try to rule them out to get an ever-narrower range of remaining possibilities, they don't start with some presumed facts and derive others from those. I propose doing the same thing with ethics: we don't start with anything as certain, we start out with a bunch of possibilities, and then narrow them down. The point above is that all those possibilities are "ought" to begin with, and narrowing them down doesn't appeal to any "is" either).

The physical sciences start with uncertain "is" hypotheses and try to rule them out to get an ever-narrower range of remaining possibilities, they don't start with some presumed facts and derive others from those. — Pfhorrest

There are facts, and then there are axioms. Naturalism certainly starts with the axiom of 'nothing beyond nature' . You yourself start with that presumption. Those axioms dictate what kinds of explanations will be considered, what kinds of facts can be meaningfully sought.

Likewise secular morality as a matter of definition needs to ground its principles in what can be known of nature by rational and empirical means. The term 'secular' explicitly means 'as distinct from religious', and accordingly, there are certain kinds of judgments that it is precluded from considering, such as 'that man's conscience derives from God'.

Naturalism certainly starts with the axiom of 'nothing beyond nature' . You yourself start with that presumption — Wayfarer

I don't start from it, I derive it from the earlier methodological principle of criticism. You can't possibly test claims about things beyond all experience ("beyond nature"), so any claims about that are inherently unquestionable, and so violate the principle to hold everything open to question ("criticism").

That principle (criticism) in turn is an application of an even deeper, practical principle that I've sometimes termed "humility": always assume in every endeavor that failure is still possible, or equivalently that success is not guaranteed. Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming there is a possibility that your answers might be wrong, i.e. holding them open to questioning.

That principle (humility) is in turn an application of the even deeper practical principle to always try. If you assume success is guaranteed, or that failure is impossible, then there is no need to try; trying tacitly assumes that you need to try and can't just sit back and win with no effort.

Another practical application of that first principle to always try, one on par with "humility", which I've sometimes termed "hope", is to always assume in every endeavor that success is still possible, or equivalently that failure is not guaranteed. For the same reason that in trying, you must tacitly assume that there is a point to trying, and aren't just doomed to failure no matter what.

Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming that there are genuine answers (not mere opinions) to be found, even if you haven't found them yet. That ("hope" applied to inquiry) is the principle I call "objectivism".

And a consequence of that, on par with phenomenalism (that principle you're disputing, about nothing being beyond experience), is a principle I call "liberalism", which says to allow people to hold any opinion as their preferred possible answer until it can be shown wrong, because to do otherwise would, via infinite regress, require holding no opinions to be possible options at all; or else, contra criticism, starting with some things being just beyond question.

Those four things derived from "always try", applied to ethics specifically, mean:

- Assume it's possible to find genuine answers to moral questions
- Don't just take anyone's word for what they are, question everything
- Take everything as "possibly good", i.e. permissible, until it is shown bad
- Show things bad by appealing to repeatable experiences of them feeling bad

That's really the core of my whole ethical system, and the rest is just details.

Applied to the endeavor of inquiry, that means always assuming that there are genuine answers (not mere opinions) to be found, even if you haven't found them yet. That ("hope" applied to inquiry) is the principle I call "objectivism". — Pfhorrest

Yes, but the problem with your approach is this principle of 'maximising hedonism' or however you describe it. Sure, you're appealing to something more than your opinion, only insofar as it's a kind of collective opinion - something which pleases the greatest number of constituents, if you like.

This *is* a kind of utilitarianism, as I and others here have said, even though you keep disputing it. The basic definition of utilitarianism is 'the greatest good for the greatest number', and I don't see how you're not saying that.

But along with that you're already declaring out of bounds all those many things which are swept up under your heading 'transcendent' and 'fideism', which includes a lot of territory - almost everything associated with spirituality and religion.

You can't possibly test claims about things beyond all experience ("beyond nature"), so any claims about that are inherently unquestionable, and so violate the principle to hold everything open to question ("criticism"). — Pfhorrest

The problem is, that 'the bounds of experience' are very much culturally-conditioned also. If you're in a culture that values spiritual experience, then such experiences are by nature not out of bounds.There are ways of disseminating them, ways of navigating them. That's one of the meanings of culture.

In the secular west, they're out of bounds because we're bound by a lot of implicit assumptions about human nature drawn from the scientific-secular outlook on life. Secular morality pretends to be based on what the world is really like when the clouds of religious superstition have been dispersed. But a great deal of it is built around Enlightenment rationalism, which basically puts science in the place previously occupied by religion. (And that is not my idea, there is a voluminous literature on these factors.)

At the end of the day an ethical philosophy has to provide for an unqualified good - something which is good as a matter of fact, not opinion. You can trace the lineage of that idea to Platonism, for instance, wherein the 'vision of the Good' was the acme of the philosophical quest, whereas most ordinary people (the hoi polloi) are 'prisoners in the cave' - of mere opinion, doxa and pistis. Sure, it's radically antidemocratic, but then Plato was writing at the dawn of civilized culture.

I value many of the qualities that modern secular culture provides - freedom of thought, freedom of religion, commitment to technological progress and political equality. These are all good things, but in the absence of a philosophy which orients one to spiritual growth - those qualities that were in bygone days the province of religious lore - then they're basically empty. And you do see that sense of emptiness echoed in a lot of modern culture - a sense of lack, a lack of relatedness, relationship, and meaning. Secularism provides a framework, but that's all it provides; it doesn't have any intrinsic good in that sense, beyond providing the framework within which such goods can be sought.

This *is* a kind of utilitarianism, as I and others here have said, even though you keep disputing it. The basic definition of utilitarianism is 'the greatest good for the greatest number', and I don't see how you're not saying that. — Wayfarer

I've repeatedly elaborated on how I'm not. That's why I keep drawing the analogy with physical sciences, to illustrate that difference. The physical-science analogue of utilitarianism would be "ask everybody what they believe is real, and declare whatever the majority says to be reality". We adamantly do not do that in the physical sciences, for good reason, and I am vehemently opposed to doing it in ethics either, for the same reasons. Instead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality). NB that physical science aims to account for all (replicable) empirical experiences, not just a simple majority, and my ethical science would do likewise with hedonic experiences.

The problem is, that 'the bounds of experience' are very much culturally-conditioned also. If you're in a culture that values spiritual experience, then such experiences are by nature not out of bounds.There are ways of disseminating them, ways of navigating them. That's one of the meanings of culture. — Wayfarer

If those "spiritual experiences" are replicable -- if someone else can go and do the same things that someone who claims to have them did, and also have them, the same ones -- then they're perfectly admissible in my ethical system (and my take of science, for that matter, if the experiences are of a descriptive rather than prescriptive nature). If they're not replicable, then they're useless as a common grounds for questioning which opinions are the right or wrong ones (you're back to just opposing claims about who had which experience and which was legit), and only then ruled out as putting some things beyond question.

At the end of the day an ethical philosophy has to provide for an unqualified good - something which is good as a matter of fact, not opinion. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. Which is why saying either "there is no matter of fact, there is only opinion" (nihilism) or "you'll just have to take [arbitrary source]'s word that this is the matter of fact" (fideism) cannot possibly work. The first for obvious reasons, the second for the only slightly-less obvious reason that's as old as the Euthyphro: what if "the gods" (different arbitrary sources appealed to as authoritative) disagree, how do you choose which one to listen to?; and even if they do all agree, are they right because they know of some good reason to think as they do (in which case it's that reason that really matters to us, and they're just messengers), or is just any arbitrary thing they say right by definition (in which case, how is that any better than mere opinion)?

Partially inspired by this conversation, I just added the following two paragraphs to my essay on my general philosophy:

Phenomenalism may superficially sound similar to nihilism (there being nothing more to things than their experiential qualities sounds superficially similar to there being no actual things but only the appearance of them), but as previously elaborated in my essays against nihilism and against transcendentalism, I differentiate clearly between the two, and hold to objectivism. Conversely, while objectivism may sound like it could entail transcendentalism, for the same reasons but in reverse, I have already explained why I think it does not, and still hold to phenomenalism as well. An objective phenomenalism is not nihilistic, and a phenomenal objectivism is not transcendent. Likewise, liberalism may superficially sound similar to fideism (not requiring justification to hold a belief sounds superficially similar to condoning appeals to faith), but as previously elaborated in my essays against fideism and against cynicism, I differentiate clearly between the two, and hold to criticism. And conversely, while criticism may sound like it could entail cynicism, for the same reasons but in reverse, I have already explained why I think that does not, and still hold to liberalism as well. A critical liberalism is not fideistic, and a liberal criticism is not cynical.

I strongly suspect that such chains of inference at least tacitly underlie many philosophical views: those who see the rejection of fideism for criticism leading (so they think) to cynicism and thus nihilism, and to the rejection of transcendentalism for phenomenalism and thus (so they think) to nihilism again, rightly reject nihilism and thus (as they think necessary) phenomenalism with it, along with cynicism and thus (as they think necessary) criticism along with it, embracing transcendentalism and the fideism that it entails as their only hope (so they think) against nihilism. Conversely, those who see the rejection of nihilism for objectivism leading (so they think) to transcendentalism and thus fideism, and to the rejection of cynicism for liberalism and thus (so they think) to fideism again, rightly reject fideism and thus (as they think necessary) liberalism along with it, along with transcendentalism and thus (as they think necessary) objectivism along with it, embracing cynicism and the nihilism that it entails as their only hope (so they think) against fideism. This confusion of liberalism with fideism, or equivalently of criticism with cynicism, and likewise of phenomenalism with nihilism, or equivalently of objectivism with transcendentalism, leads many people, I suspect, to see the only available options as a transcendent fideistic view, or else a cynical nihilistic view. The differentiation of those superficial similarities and so the opening up of possibilities besides those two extremes is the key insight at the core of my entire general philosophy, embracing objectivism without transcendentalism, criticism without cynicism, liberalism without fideism, and phenomenalism without nihilism. — The Codex Quaerentis: Commensurablism

Instead, I say, look at what the physical sciences do do instead of that, and adapt that to ethical inquiry, by substituting empirical experiences (experiences that "seem true or false", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about reality) with hedonic experiences (experiences that "seem good or bad", and upon interpretation give rise to opinions about morality). — Pfhorrest

I did a search on the term 'hedonic' in this thread, of which there are quite a few instances. And it all amounts to the following: that you equate something like 'the maximisation of hedonic experiences' with 'the good'. But that is hedonism, pure and simple, which simply means 'the pursuit of pleasure or of pleasurable sensations'. The only factors you seem to recognise as motivations for ethics, are appetites and the maximisation of pleasure, despite the prolixity. I think that's about all that needs saying.