I could have given this a boring title about morality and I could have put it in the poltical category or maybe science, but I’m referencing a 2025 paper by Richard Carrier and he usually frames things in the context of what religious people believe. In the process, he often exposes larger truths about the universe, so he not only shows the uselessness of gods or belief in gods, he shows how we can determine what is moral.
The paper is Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes. Pretty big claim, what, did he travel to all those other universes and find them? No, this is philosophy. And it’s the good kind of philosophy, the kind that is based on facts and how we know facts. This blog post has the scary bear analogy and others to illustrate how physical facts are used to get to facts about what we should do, like avoid being mauled by a bear.
It’s long form, something I’m working on spending more time with because I can see the rot of our society due to memes and TikTok scrolling and spending milliseconds on headlines and pithy quotes. Here are key takeaways:
After all the lead-up, there is a section “Defining Moral Facts”, where he says what we mean by ought is, “That which we would do if we were reasoning logically and knew and understood all the relevant facts of our situation.”
Note there are two parts, rational acting people (or any creatures, I guess), and the relevant facts. Both questions require a depth of understanding of physics, evolution, logic, neuroscience, and on and on. But I found a summation in the comments; there are four bullet points he lists on January 2nd, and a follow-up. It goes something like:
Villains don’t believe in godly punishment, so they do what they do. A rational agent would change their behavior once aware of its outcome, be it godly punishment or a miserable existence on earth. That’s what it means for a moral fact to be true even when the agent irrationally doesn’t believe it. Getting “God back in” or convincing someone their life is better if they are moral has a prerequisite of rational behavior.