Originally posted by Jichard
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Parallel point in the case of moral beliefs. Pointing out that moral beliefs are partially caused by a naturalistic evolutionary process that's completely determined by the laws of nature [with initial conditions], does not tell me about the truth-conditions for those moral beliefs, nor does it show that those moral beliefs cannot be correct while opposing moral beliefs are incorrect.
First, compatibilism regarding free will: free will is compatible with determinism. So claiming that we're "determined, completely, by the laws of nature", doesn't show that we lack free will. In fact, your quote is technically false since it's not the laws of nature that determine what we do. You'd at least have to say laws of nature + initial conditions.
Second, I don't get your use of the word "judges" here. Standards don't judge since standards aren't agents. Instead, agents may form judgments (or more precisely: beliefs), in part, by using a standard. Again, this just just be terminological discrepancy between the two of us.
Unlike you Kant knew that there had to be judge for his system to work:
Now this original intellectual and (as a conception of duty) moral capacity, called conscience, has this peculiarity in it, that although its business is a business of man with himself, yet he finds himself compelled by his reason to transact it as if at the command of another person. For the transaction here is the conduct of a trial (causa) before a tribunal. But that he who is accused by his conscience should be conceived as one and the same person with the judge is an absurd conception of a judicial court; for then the complainant would always lose his case. Therefore, in all duties the conscience of the man must regard another than himself as the judge of his actions, if it is to avoid self-contradiction. Now this other may be an actual or a merely ideal person which reason frames to itself. Such an idealized person (the authorized judge of conscience) must be one who knows the heart; for the tribunal is set up in the inward part of man; at the same time he must also be all-obliging, that is, must be or be conceived as a person in respect of whom all duties are to be regarded as his commands; since conscience is the inward judge of all free actions. Now, since such a moral being must at the same time possess all power (in heaven and earth), since otherwise he could not give his commands their proper effect (which the office of judge necessarily requires), and since such a moral being possessing power over all is called God, hence conscience must be conceived as the subjective principle of a responsibility for one's deeds before God; nay, this latter concept is contained (though it be only obscurely) in every moral self-consciousness.
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