I usually ignore the generally awful Stone Blog, but Alex Rosenberg sent along his nice piece on a topic I'm quite interested in. I particularly liked this succinct rejoinder to those who like to compare mathematical and moral knowledge:
A few philosophers claimed that we have a moral sense that perceives the moral rightness or wrongness of things directly and immediately. This theory might be worth taking seriously if morality were like mathematics. Mathematicians all agree that we know with certainty a large number of mathematical truths. Since experiment and observation could never be the source of such certainty, we (or at least mathematicians) must have some other way of knowing mathematical truths — a mathematical sense that directly perceives them. For this argument to work in ethics, there would have to be little or no ethical disagreement to begin with. Since many moral disagreements seem intractable even among experts, the hypothesis that we are equipped to know moral truths directly is very difficult to sustain.
Since the comments at the Stone Blog are generally worthless, I thought I would open comments here for those who want to discuss the philosophical issues raised by Rosenberg's piece.
