Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.
Presumably he has an answer to that; I still don’t think he’s stipulating things as you suggest, but I am sympathetic to the concern you raise, which to me appears to be the systematic and longstanding variation in normative moral intuitions.
Another, related problem is variation in metaethical positions/”seemings.” Bentham makes all sorts of remarks about how things seem to him that only make sense if you’re a moral realist, but things don’t seem that way to me. If they seem any way at all, its the exact opposite.
That’s fair. I suppose that I was attempting to translate his statements into something that I could understand rather than taking them literally, as I should have.