I agree that you need ridiculously fundamental assumptions like “I am not a Boltzmann brain that ephemerally emerged from the aether and is about to vanish” and “we are not in a simulation”. But if you have that kind of thing, I think you can reasonably discuss objective reality
I think if you grant something like “suffering is bad” you get (some form of) ethics, and this seems like a pretty minimal assumption. (Though I agree you can have an internally consistent view that suffering as good just as you can have an internally consistent view that you are a Boltzmann brain.)
I’d argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there’s wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)
It’s enough to get you something like “if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing” but that’s pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost
I agree that you need ridiculously fundamental assumptions like “I am not a Boltzmann brain that ephemerally emerged from the aether and is about to vanish” and “we are not in a simulation”. But if you have that kind of thing, I think you can reasonably discuss objective reality
I think if you grant something like “suffering is bad” you get (some form of) ethics, and this seems like a pretty minimal assumption. (Though I agree you can have an internally consistent view that suffering as good just as you can have an internally consistent view that you are a Boltzmann brain.)
I’d argue that you also need some assumptions around is-ought, whether to be a consequentialist or not, what else (if at all) you value and how this trades off against suffering, etc. And you also need to decide on some boundaries for which entities are capable of suffering in a meaningful way, which there’s wide spread disagreement on (in a way that imo goes beyond being empirical)
It’s enough to get you something like “if suffering can be averted costlessly then this is a good thing” but that’s pretty rarely practically relevant. Everything has a cost