If you caught my letter in Issue 175 of Philosophy Now—responding to Jimmy Alfonso Licon’s piece on moral intuitions—thanks for taking the time to look up the site!
In that note, I wanted to push past the usual stalemate we get stuck in with potential-futures arguments. Licon rightly observes that if we resist comparing a scrambled egg to homicide, it suggests either a flaw in applying the principle or that the principle itself is incomplete. I wanted to build directly on that open door. Borrowing a bit from Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, I think there’s a strong case to be made for objective value—that a universe with more flourishing life is simply, objectively better than one without it.
When we frame ethics that way, the question changes. It isn’t just about defending our current habits or throwing up our hands at our limitations; it’s about recognizing that our moral imagination expands alongside our practical ingenuity. We have to figure out how to build the better world we can already envision.
That effort to think through objective truth, value, and how human understanding actually moves forward is the main reason I write here at Current Philosophy.
If that way of looking at things strikes a chord with you—or if you think Licon, Nagel, or I have it entirely wrong—I’d love to hear your take. Take a look at a couple of the recent posts below, and feel free to jump into the comments. The whole point of this site is to have the conversation.
A few places to start:
- Objective Morality in a Material World: Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos -A direct deep dive into Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, moral realism, and why avoiding harm reflects an objective truth about reality rather than just an evolutionary trick.
- Roderick Chisholm’s View of Free Will: The Causal Double Standard -On metaphysics and action theory—an essay looking at how Chisholm flips the free-will debate by challenging the “obviousness” of physical event causation.
Glad you’re here,
L. Silas Sterling
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