Hello readers!
I haven’t contributed to Johno’s blog in a while. I’ve been busy struggling through doing some important things to further my graduate school career as well as watching my country crumble into an oligarchical wasteland before my eyes. I’ll be entering my 5th year of my PhD program at the end of the summer, and the rubber will need to hit the road soon. This means dialing down pretty much all of my online activity and activism to make sure I can succeed and defend my dissertation next Spring. This isn’t saying goodbye, I’m just explaining my waning contributions here. I continue to thank Johno for providing a platform, and I’m glad that he seems eager to share all sorts of perspectives. I don’t think we agree on everything (but nobody agrees with anyone on everything), but I think amplifying more voices is better on the whole, and he and I certainly share the value of amplifying well-thought out comments of the readers here.
I’ve been creating some content of my own this past Spring, and I have created my own YouTube channel. It’s still new-ish and I’m working out many of the production kinks, but I figure it’s better to get something started and get better over time with practice.
Part of the motivation was so that I could independently create content that I value that doesn’t necessarily need to be endorsed by anyone else I share a platform with, and I’m interested in some videos about activism and social justice that don’t seem entirely in line with this blog. Admittedly, a lot of my content is currently focused on appealing to anti-SJWs and edgelords and trying to deradicalize them, which isn’t really the focus of this particular blog. Even though the writers here and many commenters support very pro-social justice stances, I don’t want to drag this blog which I don’t own into fights that other folks aren’t on board with. That being said, I just put out a video that is very Philosophy-oriented, and I think it is a good fit.
In this video I defend moral realism against 5 common objections to objective morality that I see. This is a somewhat unpopular stance among atheists, though there are prominent defenders of moral realism like Sam Harris, Dan Fincke, and Matt Dillahunty, as well as many atheists who are moral realists. I have had several commenters here object specifically to my metaethical model of morality. Perhaps you will enjoy it!
https://youtu.be/iUqjjTAicRA
I find the comment sections here are usually filled with good feedback and good-faith critique, so I genuinely look forward to seeing the comments here, even though I know that some of you already disagree. If you think this was well-argued and well thought out, perhaps subscribe to my channel and check out the other stuff that I have put together.
I’m also curious about Johno’s metaethical stances! He mentions in an old post on Skeptic Ink that he considers himself a conceptual nominalist and that he thinks that the term “objective” when referring to morality might be misleading*. I’m not certain how much this conflicts with my own view, and I’m certain there’s more that I need to think about. That being said, I think most atheists take the easy road out and give up on moral realism altogether without serious consideration. Perhaps, Johno, we can have a livestream and you can educate me and some viewers in real time some day!
Alright, that’s enough waffling. Thanks for viewing! I’ll be back around to get back to bashing Matt Walsh some more soon.
*I have many of the same objections to the term “subjective”, which is often poorly-defined and people use in a wide variety of ways.
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