Thinking Complete

The debate over moral realism is often framed in terms of a binary question: are there ever objective facts about what’s moral to do in a given situation? The broader question of normative realism is also framed in a similar way: are there ever objective facts about what’s rational to do in a given situation? But I think we can understand these topics better by reframing them in terms of the question: how much do normative beliefs converge or diverge as ontologies improve? In other words: let’s stop thinking about whether we can derive normativity from nothing, and start thinking about how much normativity we can derive from how little, given that we continue to improve our understanding of the world. The core intuition behind this approach is that, even if a better understand of science and mathematics can’t directly tell us what we should value, it can heavily influence how our values develop over time. Values under ontology improvements By “ontology” I mean the set of concepts whic