Re: I May Be a Philosophy Noob, But...
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How is because I want to survive arbitrary?
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Recharacterize the statement as "my survival is good." Now prove it without making a moral assumption of the form "x is good" or "x is bad." At some point, you must make an arbitrary (or intuitive) choice between "x is good" and "x is bad."
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and what would it mean to posit a non-arbitrary principle?
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That is exactly my point -- all moral principles derive, fundamentally, from an arbitrary assumption about what is good and what is bad. None of the principles derived from the initial assumption are arbitrary in realtion to the assumption -- they follow from deductive reasoning, the initial assumption, and experience(science). But at base, they too are the result of an arbitrary chioce.
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