Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant

Yes, but not the same morality. The point is that all morality is relative, and your example supports the thesis -- dog morality is not chimp morality, which is not human morality.

> Nature has evolved that, in humans it has created certain rather strong thoughts and feelings on the subject. So in that sense nature does care.

Absolutely false. You're imagining an intent in nature for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

Your child is starving, and a dolphin is available as a food source. You have to choose which moral standard to adopt -- yours, or the dolphin's (another thinking creature). They aren't the same, indeed they absolutely conflict.

> So in terms of outcomes nature cares as well.

You really need to expel this idea -- it's quite false. Nature is morally neutral, and does not care.

I do not think you have comprehended Luke's perspective. Your rebuttal is largely demonstrating the behaviors he is, aptly in my opinion, criticizing.

Your overly romantic definition of philosophical inquiry would relegate it to a metaphysics of the unknown at best, mysticism in the cloak of learned language at worst.

I cannot conceive of how you interpret any of what Luke is saying as being even covertly anti-intellectual. You appear to be projecting your own world view and social groupings onto this topic, and presupposing some conflicts between them.

This continuum of deeply inscrutable pure truth pursued by inquiry at one end opposed to surface practical technical solutions developed by practitioners at the other is an artificial perspective. There is no opposition between these things. Often both are advanced in the same moment, and by the same work.

Descartes himself is an excellent example: he was intensely focused on devising exact formal methods. His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up.

I strongly encourage anyone who finds this discussion interesting to read the mentioned books by Pearl and Kahneman. They have transformed my thinking more than anything else I have learned in my entire life up to this point. These aren't mere technical tools, or interesting empirical results in some corner of practice.

I don't know of a short introduction to Kahneman's work, but the epilog to Pearl's book[1] is a short read and touches on the philosophical side of his thinking.

Kahneman is an easy and very enjoyable read, but do not underestimate the value of learning your mental model of your own cognition has no clothes.

Pearl's basic concepts are accessible, but finishing the book will require some effort for most, as will considering the implications rigorously. It's worth it however, because he provides a compete theory of knowledge that is both philosophically rigorous and algorithmically exact. His Turing Award lecture[2] should give you some sense of how staggeringly broad the implications of his formalism are.

[1]: http://www.nyu.edu/classes/shrout/SEM06/pearl.pdf

[2]: http://amturing.acm.org/vp/pearl_2658896.cfm

This is naive scientific triumphalism of the first order, utterly illiterate with regards to the philosophical foundations of science, the rigorous and multi-layered debates over the status of scientific statements that have been ongoing for centuries to the present day: from Bacon, Gallileo and Descartes (with deep roots in Lucretius, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, Epicurus, Heraclitus) through Spinoza, Leibniz and Newton himself, on into such titans as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger, Russell, Whitehead, Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Quine.

And yet! And yet! It was all so simple, gads and forsooth!!

I give you the final word, gentle reader, it was all for naught, these men with their devotion to rigor and clarity of thought, their conversations spanning centuries, their volumes of pointless abstraction, Hegel with his historicism and Kant with his categories, cynical Kuhn and his paradigms, pragmatic Popper with his Worlds 1 and 2, Whitehead with his ingressions pseudo-Aristotelian speculations and Bergson teasing out duration and intuition.

Throw out your Rutledge Encyclopedia: and behold the simplicity they all failed to grasp:

A scientific idea is "correct" if it can be successfully compared to reality.

How hard is that indeed!! Not hard at all. Simplicity itself, devastating in its directness and comprehensive competence, lovely in its completeness. Centuries of debate quelled in a single utterance. Well done.

"His philosophical results are now largely a historical marker on a road to nowhere. His formalisms are still used by every human practitioner of math from elementary school students on up."

As if his "formalisms" could stand on their own without the philosophical foundations of his entire system. And yes this is what modernity after Hume did -- take Descartes' project forward long after the core assumptions had been completely undermined.

In many ways the history of modern philosophy since has been a quest to re-ground the Cartesian project with the kind of confidence he promised, and a succession of regressive rear-guard actions taken against the encroaching skepticism that threatened the entire enterprise at every turn. And finally we're left with a weird, cobbled-together Popperian/Kuhnian pragmatism that long ago gave up on "certainty" or "clarity" and settled for "less wrong."

No wonder philosophy is held in such low regard in scientific communities. It has done science no favors whatsoever in the last century, other than to progressively undermine its naive epistemological assumptions and redirect it back to some kind of Formal Realism -- at which point the scientific community yells "remember Galileo!!" and runs the other direction.

It's a sad state of affairs when we can't distinguish between the salutary philosophical insights of Aristotle and religious tyranny. It's going to take a long, long time to recast the entire narrative to where the two points of view can inform each other once again.

I think the one thing that set me off in the original comment is that morality is a 'human invention'. A more complete picture would be that humans, dogs, and apes are a creation of nature, which has endowed them with a sense of morality. Not one that is consistent or infallible, just as your sense of balance doesn't always correctly tell you what is up and what is down, but a sense nevertheless.

In physics, referentials are relative. We don't say, let's expel the idea of referentials. There is no one absolute referential, but the concept of a referential is a useful one in a variety of contexts and worth developing. No one physical theory is final or complete, but some are more useful than others.

As your example notes, we cannot avoid acting, so thinking about the best ways to act is a useful project. Saying "it's all relative and nature is morally neutral, so I can do and justify whatever I want" is a moral choice, but not necessarily the one likely to lead to the least conflict.