You're conflating "evidence" for a theory with "what a theory explains". Germ theory provides a unifying framework that explains why hand-washing, sterilization, quarantine, and antibiotics all work, and allows us to predict which novel interventions will succeed; we're not just looking at germs under a fancy microscope. Before germ theory, miasma theory also "worked" in the sense that people could list downstream effects ("bad smells correlate with disease"), but it couldn't generate reliable predictions or explain why certain practices succeeded while others failed!
Moral frameworks function the same way. Without one, you have a disconnected list of "things that provoke disgust" and "things that get you punished"... but no way to reason about novel cases or conflicts between values, or explain why these various intuitions cluster together. Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"? A moral framework provides the structure; raw disgust does not.
For child sacrifice: humans also once believed disease came from evil spirits, that the earth was the center of the universe, that heavier objects fall faster. Does the existence of these errors make physics and biology "redundant frameworks"? Obviously not. it means humans can be wrong, and can reason from false premises.
Notice that even cultures practicing child sacrifice typically had strict rules about when, how, and which children could be sacrificed. This suggests they recognized the moral weight of taking a child's life! They just had false beliefs about gods, afterlives, and cosmic bargains that led them to different conclusions. They weren't operating without moral frameworks; they were operating with moral frameworks plus false empirical/metaphysical beliefs.
More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress! If morality is just "what currently provokes disgust," then the abolition of child sacrifice wasn't progress. It was merely a change in fashion, no different from skinny jeans becoming not skinny. But you clearly do think those cultures were wrong (you're citing child sacrifice as a historical horror, not a neutral anthropological curiosity). That normative judgment requires exactly the moral framework you're calling redundant.
Your response seems AI-generated (or significantly AI-”enhanced”), so I’m not going to bother responding to any follow-ups.
> More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress!
I don’t think “moral progress” (or any other kind of “progress”, e.g. “technological progress”) is a meaningful category that needs to be “accounted for”.
> Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"?
I can see “hunting babies” being more acceptable to “torturing prisoners” to many people. Many people don’t consider babies on par with grown-up humans due to their limited neurological development and consciousness. Vice versa, many people find the idea of eating chicken abhorrent and would say that a society of meat-eaters is worse than a thousand Nazi Germanies. This is not a strawman I came up with, I’ve interacted with people who hold this exact opinion, and I think from their perspective it is justified.
> [Without a moral framework you have] no way to reason about novel cases
You can easily reason about novel cases without a moral framework. It just won’t be moral reasoning (which wouldn’t add anything in itself). Is stabbing a robot to death okay? We can think about in terms of how I feel about it. It’s kinda human-shaped, so I’d probably feel a bit weird about it. How would others react to me stabbing it this way? They’d probably feel similarly. Plus, it’s expensive electronics, people don’t like wastefulness. Would it be legal? Probably.
>I got lazy with your responses and just threw in a few bullet points to AI
This should legit be a permabannable offense. That is titanically disrespectful of not just your discussion partner, but of good discussion culture as a whole.
I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human moral sense" -- at least that'd be a really bad conclusion to humanity as AI scales up).
Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in the reply above.
Yeah but nobody is gonna read it if they waded through five paragraphs of insubstantial LLM slop from you before. You betrayed the trust of everyone reading that post, wasting their time, energy and quite frankly making us feel a little dirty for reading in good faith what turned out to be something you put zero effort into generating and took us a lot of effort to read. Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me and all that.
This is exactly, genuinely, 100% what I was talking about when I said you were being direspectful of good discussion culture. You're turning it from high-trust into low-trust and soon nobody will be reading any comment longer than two sentences by default.
Moral frameworks function the same way. Without one, you have a disconnected list of "things that provoke disgust" and "things that get you punished"... but no way to reason about novel cases or conflicts between values, or explain why these various intuitions cluster together. Why does "hunting babies" feel similar to "torturing prisoners" but different from "eating chicken"? A moral framework provides the structure; raw disgust does not.
For child sacrifice: humans also once believed disease came from evil spirits, that the earth was the center of the universe, that heavier objects fall faster. Does the existence of these errors make physics and biology "redundant frameworks"? Obviously not. it means humans can be wrong, and can reason from false premises. Notice that even cultures practicing child sacrifice typically had strict rules about when, how, and which children could be sacrificed. This suggests they recognized the moral weight of taking a child's life! They just had false beliefs about gods, afterlives, and cosmic bargains that led them to different conclusions. They weren't operating without moral frameworks; they were operating with moral frameworks plus false empirical/metaphysical beliefs.
More importantly, your framework cannot account for moral progress! If morality is just "what currently provokes disgust," then the abolition of child sacrifice wasn't progress. It was merely a change in fashion, no different from skinny jeans becoming not skinny. But you clearly do think those cultures were wrong (you're citing child sacrifice as a historical horror, not a neutral anthropological curiosity). That normative judgment requires exactly the moral framework you're calling redundant.