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Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`
Whether people choose to value certain moral values higher than others is largely not for me to judge. Only a few serious infringements on others rights and freedoms (i.e., murder, theft etc.) I believe should be treated firmly. Most other moral issues I believe should be free to the individual to decide, and the dynamics of power, influence, determination etc. will naturally determine which moral values hold consensus and which don't.
This is interesting, because when I asked you about morality, you said it was what is "the best measure of a moral truth is its usefulness [to the species]." Then when I ask "Useful *how*?" you said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`
Useful to many measures of both financial and non-financial progress including the long-term survival, well-being and happiness of our species. Some of these measures are weighed more heavily than others since some are more important during particular times. As such, it is a dynamic criteria of many measures already collected by many institutions including the organisation for economic cooperation and development, the global competitiveness index, the happiness index and a whole variety of environmental impact indexes.
None of your concepts of individual freedoms actually plays into this concept of usefulness. At all. People are free to do all sorts of things that are not useful to the species. And so while you're saying you don't judge them, you've clearly set up parameters by which moral decisions are to be judged, namely whether they are "useful to the species" or not.
I find this to be a confused mess wherein you just kind of grab at things you agree with and use the inherent flexibility provided to you by a utilitarian framework to defend it, but at the same time declare explicit measures of usefulness that you choose to ignore because you want to place a higher value on individual freedoms than the things your utilitarian framework is built around (individual freedoms that you don't particularly justify).
When do you believe that individual freedoms should apply to an individual? A 10 day old baby clearly doesn't much freedom to choose, yet you would (presumably) require that a parent engage in behaviors to preserve the future freedoms of the baby. But that baby is infringing on the parents' freedom to do things other than care for the baby. So who wins and why?