Science And The Meaning Of Life, Ctd

Freddie DeBoer clarifies his post:

Morality, to my lights, is best thought of as an agreement between people, which is therefore never certain, timeless, or transcendent. I think it is to our practical benefit to act as though there is no moral value that transcends limited human agreement. Which means, yes, I am incapable of saying that the Taliban is objectively or certainly of inferior moral value to the Dalai Llama. And if you'd like to haul out the high school debating team tactic, no, I can't say that Hitler, the Holocaust or Nazism are permanently, objectively and non-contingently evil in some transcendent way.


That doesn't mean that I don't consider them evil, or that I can't fight them, or that my feelings towards Nazism and the obligation to fight it are any less passionate or committed. Not at all. It merely means that I find the genesis of that opposition and that passion to be within the subjective framework of my own life. This is part of the problem again: people insist that saying, for example, that scientific truth is socially constructed represents some great insult to science, but it only would be if you maintain belief in a transcendent truth that socially constructed truth can be compared to. I don't. From my perspective, use visions of truth are actually more respectful of science, because science is fantastically useful.