VeganDE

It seems my reply got so long that lemmy won't let me post it completely. So you'll get it in parts.

Part 1 of 2:

Have I missed it? …as I said before, emotions are needed but only as a basis. And I believe you agreed on that.

I just wanted to explain why I said, what I said. You questioned Veganisms from a nihilistic perspective in your original comment. And yes, at first it did not become clear what your standpoint with regard to the connection of emotion and ethics is. But since we cleared that up and agree on that we can move on.

Without using logic to distill morality, you’d get an animalistic set of morals as wild and clueless as our emotions often are… the same kind of morality that an animal, like the wolf, would have, because that’s all it has: instint / emotion

You are again attributing moral as something which can exist without the capability of reasoning about it, i.e., purely instinctual and emotionally driven behaviour is already something which you understand as morality. This is a fundamental disagreement we seem to have with regard to the definition of moral. You observed this as well and provided your definition. I will deal with that later.

I say that moral can only be an attribute of a being which is capable of higher reasoning. If a being is not able to even have such labels as "right" or "wrong" and not able to attribute them to its actions, then it can not have moral. A wolf acts instinctively, as I have detailed before. That's why it's not a moral agent and can't act morally "good" or "bad". Those are labels we put on the wolves since we have moral agency.

based on our current understanding, humans might not even have any real “agency” themselves. That’s something that scientists and philosophers have been discussing for ages without reaching any sort of agreement… many think that “free will” is just an illusion. [...]
I wonder what’s you position about “determinism”. I’m not sure how would you reconcile it with your idea of morality, which seems to require the need for agency.

I don’t believe in free will. But my take on morality does not require it.

The illusion of free will, yes. I am well aware of that. There have been studies which show that we already have a decision for an action before we become aware of it. It makes sense that we could predict the actions of someone before they are becoming aware of it, if we have a detailed view of their neural circuitry. We could simulate the exchange of electrochemical signals, which are again rooted in external and internal inputs, like sensory information. There is a clear cause and effect visible on a macroscopic scale. If we could create a very well controlled environment we could even make some guarantees about our predictions.

(This will now get abstract for a while, but bear with me, you'll see how this will become relevant.)

However, no environment is currently perfectly controllable. And it is not even possible in theory. Are you familiar with Laplace's demon? If not, here is a short summary: Laplace's demon is basically the idea that there could exist a being, which is able to perfectly predict the future state of each and every particle in the whole universe, as well as to determine its past. It is the ultimate culmination of determinism and also illustrates the illusion of free will. Because, if we can simulate the interaction of each and every particle in the whole universe, given the knowledge about their current state, we basically know beforehand what decisions humans will make. If we would construct a machine which resembles Laplace's demon, then this machine could even be able to predict it's own predictions, which would lead to an interesting paradox.

But, as far as I know, our current understanding of the universe does not allow Laplace's demon to exist. One of the major problems is the exchange speed of information. Einstein disullisoned us of that when he found out that there can be nothing faster than the speed of light. This includes the speed of communication. Laplace's demon can't exist, because it is not able to know the current state of particles which are lightyears away from it. It can't even perfectly know the current state of particles which are one centimeter away from it, since it only sees a shadow of it, which was casted a very brief moment before.
There are more reasons why such a demon can not exist. For the sake of not making my response excessively longer than it already is, I omit them, but I will highlight another important one:
True randomness. Given our current knowledge, true randomness exists on a quantum level. If you would like to know more about that, I refer you to Heisenberg's unvertainty principle. Even though deterministic interpretations like the de Broglie-Bohm theory exist (or the Many-Worlds-Interpretation, which I reject for now for a lack of evidence of parallel universes), those and other hidden variable theories have been deeply challenged by the findings for which three physicists were are awarded a nobel prize last year. Those basically proved that our universe is not locally real. (Here are two resources to wrap your head around it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-universe-is-not-locally-real-and-the-physics-nobel-prize-winners-proved-it/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txlCvCSefYQ )

So either it is real or local or none of them, but it can't be both, if I understood that correctly. This again underlines the existence of true randomness on a quantum scale.

If we have true randomness, our universe is not deterministic, at least not entirely, meaning it is probalistic. Even though we have a certain degree of determinism on a macroscopic scale (which under the hood is just a manifesation of a high probability in that view), those processes are influenced by quantum processes which are random in nature.

Consequently, Laplace's demon can't exist. Furthermore, the existence of true randomness, allows room for the existence of free will. Even though "free will" is the high level product of some neural circuitry, it is very difficult to perfectly predict this product as this neural circuitry in turn is again influenced by truly random processes. That doesn't mean we can make high probability predictions, but we can't do it perfectly. And that's the critical point here.

If we have free will, this supports that we have moral agency. We can evaluate whether some action is right or wrong. We can differentiate between good and bad and act to that accordingly.