Published on April 11, 2025 9:55 PM GMT
Imagine buying a new Xbox game, like Forza Horizon 3. The game disk comes with some data preloaded, like visual assets or hardcoded game mechanics, but it also contains a checksum/hash – a kind of digital fingerprint – that verifies the rest of the game data when you download it from the internet.
I think our brains work in a similar way with concepts like “morality,” “beauty,” or “masculinity.” We’re born with a kind of “checksum” for these ideas, but we don’t have all the data stored in our minds from the start. Instead, when we perform or witness moral or beautiful behavior our brains recognize that it matches the checksum, and we can “download” that behavior for future reference.
This idea clarifies the debate between concept realists and concept relativists. Concept realists often claim that concepts like morality are “objectively real,” while their relativist counterparts will claim that the morality is subjective, and point to examples of evil people to show that morality depends on the person.
Using this analogy, I think moral objectivists should reply that even immoral people have a built-in checksum for morality, but they haven't fully "downloaded" the program due to a lack of experience or practice with moral behavior. In contrast, moral relativists might see moral behaviors as highly flexible and shaped by experience, much like in-game data such as HP levels or experience points, which can change and evolve as we "play the game" of life. There is no hardcoded “correct” HP level, or experience level, and these data are stored in malleable RAM rather than on the game disk.
Some people might argue that morality can't be objective because we can't see it or touch it. But I think that's like saying a game doesn't exist just because we can't see all the data on the disk. Our brains can still recognize moral actions because they match the checksum, even if we don't have all the details stored in our heads.
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