/lit/ - Literature

>>10325525
So?

None of that proves that I have a moral obligation to save the child. It's accurate, but irrelevant. How I feel, and what I believe, and what you believe, and how you feel, are utterly meaningless. In seeking to understand the world we must embody not the participant but the observer.

I ask - what if you saw someone else saving a child in the pond. You see them saving the child. Afterwards you ask them why they did it and they said they did it because they felt like they should. When you write this event down in your scientific logbook to compile for your research, can you accurately write that you SAW any sign - at all - indicating that the saviour /should/ save the child? No. You can only write what you observed - that the saviour did save the child, and that he did it because he /felt/ he should.

Aha! you say. Then I have observed a force that makes people /feel/ like they should save children. Congratulations. This 'force' is called 'emotions' and it is known to exist already, and it is not the force you are looking for. You can write down what the saviour felt a thousand million times. It will never be what you need to observe to prove that this mysterious moral force exists. When I drop an apple from a balcony to see if gravity exists it falls to the ground and my hypothesis is proven. It also splatters when it hits the ground, but this is just noise - not part of my experiment. When I drop a child in a pond to see if morality exists I don't see anything at all. Sometimes the child drowns and sometimes the child gets saved but who cares? I'm not dropping children in ponds to observe how people feel about it. If I cared how people felt about it I wouldn't be dropping their children in the pond at all.