What do you say to someone who doesn’t share your goals? Eg thinks that happiness is only justified if it’s earned, and that most people do not deserve it, as they do “bad thing X”, and being against promoting happiness to them
Generally parallel things to what I’d say to someone with different fundamental epistemic standards, like:
I could be wrong about what’s justified. (Certainly my endorsing a standard doesn’t suffice to make it justified—and likewise for them. We’re not infallible!)
Check whether their answer seems objectionably ad hoc in some way, fails to treat like cases alike, is in tension with other claims they accept, or rests on dubious presuppositions (“why think X is so bad?”), etc.
If we get to bedrock, neither of us will be able to persuade the other to change their mind. Still, we may each think that (at least) one of us must be mistaken about what’s genuinely justified.
+ we may at least identify some areas of overlap (e.g. it sure would suck if a clearly innocent individual were to suffer...)
What do you say to someone who doesn’t share your goals? Eg thinks that happiness is only justified if it’s earned, and that most people do not deserve it, as they do “bad thing X”, and being against promoting happiness to them
Generally parallel things to what I’d say to someone with different fundamental epistemic standards, like:
I could be wrong about what’s justified. (Certainly my endorsing a standard doesn’t suffice to make it justified—and likewise for them. We’re not infallible!)
Check whether their answer seems objectionably ad hoc in some way, fails to treat like cases alike, is in tension with other claims they accept, or rests on dubious presuppositions (“why think X is so bad?”), etc.
If we get to bedrock, neither of us will be able to persuade the other to change their mind. Still, we may each think that (at least) one of us must be mistaken about what’s genuinely justified.
+ we may at least identify some areas of overlap (e.g. it sure would suck if a clearly innocent individual were to suffer...)