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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark Chance" data-source="post: 1316207" data-attributes="member: 2795">Why "or"? Why not?: These moral principles truly universal truths, and therefore they are really good ideas if you want your society to thrive.The observation you make is quite cogent. It stands at the heart of natural law philosophy. According to natural law philosophy, moral proscriptions such as "Do not murder" are part of human nature itself. They are the laws of human nature, which is what natural law is all about.As an interesting contrast, 20th century existentialist philosophers such as Sartre (or the Marquis de Sade in the 18th and 19th centuries) prop up their denial of objective moral principles by first denying that there is any such thing as human nature. Once this is done, it becomes child's play to rationalize any form of behavior, no matter how horrible or destructive, as Sartre demonstrated in his role as a Stalinist apologist (that sounds funny) while teaching political science to Pol Pot at the University of Paris, but that's political and should probably be avoided. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />On one hand, the answer to your question is, "No, we wouldn't notice." We recognize abundance by comparison with absence, for example. OTOH, since I am at least mostly convinced that there is a natural law innate to human nature, we would notice the difference upon sufficient reflection, for we also recognize ought by comparison with is.I've seen this in action with severely abused children. What the child knows is abuse. That is the norm for the child. But, even still, there is something interior that at least hints that what is ought to be different. You can see the same thing in action in Socrates's philosophizing about the shortcomings in the religious beliefs of his time and place.Of course, these are imperfect examples of your hypothetical, but since no perfect examples exists.... Admittedly, but there are career advancement considerations since my profession is teacher (which explains why I am criminally underpaid). If not for those considerations, I'd be content to audit classes until the cows come home. It'd certainly be much cheaper.Plus, if I ever actually get to the point of getting a doctorate, I'm going to make everyone call me Doctor Chance. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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