A Case for Moral Anti-realism
NOTE: I no longer believe this to be a cogent argument against moral realism.
I think that Hume’s Guillotine can be deployed to validly extinguish the existence of moral facticity, if ‘moral’ language signifies ‘what one ought to be doing’, since in any event of reasoning about ‘what one ought to do’ it is going to be grounded in non-facts.
No matter what prescription is being utilized, even if it is a normative fact or not, it will eventually take the form of the following (no matter how many syllogisms it takes to get there):
P1: [normative non-fact]
P2: [non-normative fact]
C: [target normative statement {or some other normative fact/non-fact that derives the target}]
As a quick short-circuited example, let’s say that the target normative statement, T, is a normative fact, then one would have to argue something which will bottom-out at:
P1: One ought to abide by the normative facts.
P2: T is a normative fact.
C: T
This implies, even if it is conceded that normative facts exist, that what informs the individual of ‘what they ought to do’ is a taste: not a normative fact. If this is the case, then the study of ‘what one ought to do’ is completely non-factual—and since ‘moral’ language signifies exactly that study, it is purely non-factual.
I don’t think that the moral anti-realist has to concede that there are no normative facts but, rather, just that none of them dictate ‘what one ought to be doing’.
Ammendments:
I think I understand better some of the objections the moral realists have been making, and there is one in particular that I think is worth outlining and countering in this OP: if a normative fact is, well, a fact, then it is true in virtue of it corresponding correctly to reality (i.e., to a state of affairs) and thusly doesn't require further justification; and this doesn't seem to violate Hume's Guillotine since a normative statement is being justified with only normative statements. I think my original elaboration (above the updates) missed this key point, and to demonstrate let's take my short-circuited example:
P1: One ought to abide by the normative facts.
P2: T is a normative fact.
C: T
If T were a normative fact which expresses 'one ought...', then T is a true depiction of a state of affairs such that 'one ought...' and, thusly, it does not require further justification such as P1 and it informs the person what they ought to doing (since the normative fact refers to a prescriptive about the subject). I think, and correct me if I am wrong, this is what @Banno and @Leontiskos (as well as @J) are expressing (in a nutshell).
I think that Hume’s Guillotine can be deployed to validly extinguish the existence of moral facticity, if ‘moral’ language signifies ‘what one ought to be doing’, since in any event of reasoning about ‘what one ought to do’ it is going to be grounded in non-facts.
No matter what prescription is being utilized, even if it is a normative fact or not, it will eventually take the form of the following (no matter how many syllogisms it takes to get there):
P1: [normative non-fact]
P2: [non-normative fact]
C: [target normative statement {or some other normative fact/non-fact that derives the target}]
As a quick short-circuited example, let’s say that the target normative statement, T, is a normative fact, then one would have to argue something which will bottom-out at:
P1: One ought to abide by the normative facts.
P2: T is a normative fact.
C: T
This implies, even if it is conceded that normative facts exist, that what informs the individual of ‘what they ought to do’ is a taste: not a normative fact. If this is the case, then the study of ‘what one ought to do’ is completely non-factual—and since ‘moral’ language signifies exactly that study, it is purely non-factual.
I don’t think that the moral anti-realist has to concede that there are no normative facts but, rather, just that none of them dictate ‘what one ought to be doing’.
Ammendments:
I think I understand better some of the objections the moral realists have been making, and there is one in particular that I think is worth outlining and countering in this OP: if a normative fact is, well, a fact, then it is true in virtue of it corresponding correctly to reality (i.e., to a state of affairs) and thusly doesn't require further justification; and this doesn't seem to violate Hume's Guillotine since a normative statement is being justified with only normative statements. I think my original elaboration (above the updates) missed this key point, and to demonstrate let's take my short-circuited example:
P1: One ought to abide by the normative facts.
P2: T is a normative fact.
C: T
If T were a normative fact which expresses 'one ought...', then T is a true depiction of a state of affairs such that 'one ought...' and, thusly, it does not require further justification such as P1 and it informs the person what they ought to doing (since the normative fact refers to a prescriptive about the subject). I think, and correct me if I am wrong, this is what @Banno and @Leontiskos (as well as @J) are expressing (in a nutshell).
Comments (1570)
Let’s take a simple example: one ought not harm another.
Broadly speaking there are three different approaches.
1. The moral nihilist will argue that no statements of this kind are true.
2. The moral anti-realist will argue that some statements of this kind are true and are made true by some mind-dependent feature of the world.
3. The moral realist will argue that some statements of this kind are true and are made true by some mind-independent feature of the world.
I don’t quite see how your argument proves 2 and/or disproves 1 and 3.
It is a true statement that one ought not kick puppies for fun.
Facts are true statements.
Therefore there are moral facts.
The way I see it, P2 will also be a description, which itself can encompass a normative fact but is not a normative fact itself. If you think I am wrong, then please give me an example of a syllogism that deploys three prescriptions (i.e., on per premise and one in the conclusion) which is valid. I don't see how that is possible.
Moral nihilism is a form of moral anti-realism, so my argument is more broad than that position and could be deployed by a person that holds that position.
This is moral subjectivism, and not moral anti-realism. The former is a form of the latter. Moral nihilists and non-cognitivists are also moral anti-realists, and they do not agree with your #2.
If my OP is true, then this position would be false because moral statements are not made true by some mind-independent feature of the world (i.e., they are not moral facts).
P1 can be true and be subjective. It would be a true statement because it corresponds to one’s psyche, and the prescription itself is non-factual (being a part of one’s psyche).
More technically, I would deny, if pushed on it, P2; because technically “one ought not kick puppies for fun” is non-factual, so it is not a proposition or it is false (and only true as a non-factual claim). It would have to be “I believe that one ought not kick puppies”: then it is propositional.
A moral realist might claim that the statement "one ought not harm another" is made true by the mind-independent fact that one ought not harm another (much like someone might claim that the statement "electrons are negatively charged particles" is made true by the mind-independent fact that electrons are negatively charged particles).
I don't see how you've shown that this can't be the case.
But those not under the spell of logical positivism might puzzle at the lack of empathy apparent in Ayer's children, and further conclude that emotivism misses something of great import: that there are some things we ought despise.
If you assume that only statements about material things or sense data are facts, then of course you will conclude that moral statements are not facts. You will have done no more than reiterated your assumption.
So you are forced to deny what is blatantly evident, that these are indeed true statements, facts, simply to keep your ideology.
"One ought not pick one's nose" is normative. Supose it is a fact. Then it is a true.
Then how is "It is true that one ought not pick one's nose" not also normative?
To say of some normative statement, that it is true, is itself to make a normative statement, isn't it?
Seems too strong to me.
A moral realist need only claim that "one ought not harm another" is either true or false.
A moral antirealist claims that it has no truth value...?
Oh, is that now? Weird rituals.
I'm with @Banno on this one. Even if we accept that they are different in subtle ways, I don't think they are different vis-à-vis normativity.
Edit: Yet the problem is that P2 is a (descriptive) predication of normative facticity, not a per se predication of the truth of a normative statement. So now I agree with @J. :grin:
I think you are begging the question again, and, like in the past, you very much need to define what you mean by 'fact'. All of your arguments depend on your premise that there are no moral facts, and yet you never end up saying what you mean by a fact such that your statement could be reliably assessed.
Yet,
Quoting Bob Ross
Hence in some way T says "One ought A"
hence
it is true that one ought A
also says "one ought A".
I don't see an escape.
"T" is true IFF T.
"T" is a fact IFF T.
Quoting Banno
I think there is a legitimate ambiguity here. "T is a normative fact," could be read as, "T is normatively binding," in which case Banno would be right since this is equivalent to the claim that the normative statement is true. Yet, "T is a normative fact," could also be read as a description or categorization of a fact at a meta-ethical level, in which case the claim is not itself normative. I think this is how the OP intended it, but I sort of agree with Banno again at this point.
I think the OP meant something like this:
The middle term is meant to be descriptive, not normative.
Quoting Leontiskos
"One ought not pick one's nose" has six words... not morally binding.
"One ought not pick one's nose" is true... then you ought not pick your nose.
Quoting Leontiskos
So do I, but was in error.
Edit: part of that error may be the antirealist thesis that normative statements do not have a truth value. But if that were so then they would have no place in a truth-functional syllogism.
That's one of the problems with supposing that moral statements are not either true nor false - they drop out of rational discussion.
It's an unappetising doctrine.
Yes, but the claim of the OP is not that it is true, but rather that it is a normative fact, hence the ambiguity. This goes back to that tricky question of intention, for we can speak about normative propositions in a non-normative manner.
Quoting Banno
I don't really disagree with you in the end, but there are some subtle differences between practical syllogisms and speculative syllogisms, and there is an interesting question about whether one knows them both in the same manner. I think some of that is coming into this as well.
In any case, at the end of the day I think your argument about the truth or falsity of moral statements is sound.
I will be thinking about this but first impression is I like this a lot. A kind of Carollian regress. My intuition is that it makes sense and probably does echo sentiments of some anti-realists who might ask why they should care about the moral facts.... or rather, express their skepticism that there is anything at all to compel them to abide by the moral facts.
1. Naturalism is true
2. The linguistic and non-linguistic practices which do not refer to or supervene on any natural fact outside the linguistic and non-linguistic practices must solely depend on the collective mind judgements of the community. These mind-dependent judgements were shaped by our evolutionary history, but you would have to show evolution's main job was to ensure we arrive at true moral statement, even if it harmed our adaptability, which is clearly false.
3. "Do not harm others" does not supervene on any natural fact apart from the linguistic + non-linguistic practices in a community. Were a community to adopt "Do harm others", there would be no natural fact to which one could point to show "Do harm others" is false, whereas in the case of electrons, we could refer to the electron field, upon which "electrons are negative charged" does supervene. Or to give a better example, if someone said, "the trees don't have leaves", we would point to the tree to show it is false.
Conclusion, moral facts are mind-dependent, moral realism is false
No ambiguity. If it is a fact, it is true. If it is not true, it is not a fact.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, as in Quoting Banno
But saying they are facts has implications.
Quoting Leontiskos
Cheers. It's pretty straight Ordinary Language stuff.
If it is a true statement its truth does not share a sense with other uses of "truth". "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is false, in sense of the natural world. It fits the form of a proposition, but it doesn't rely upon any feature of the natural world for its truth. Rather we are using the word "true" in the place of the moral words "good" or "bad", which have no natural instantiations.
Now this would get along with the notion of non-natural moral facts. A more minimal anti-realist position is simply to note that there are no such facts.
For my part, though, I'd just say the significance of animal cruelty far outweighs whether there even is a fact to the matter. Animal cruelty is bad is enough for me; it need not be true. And stated like that could it even be true? ""Animal cruelty is bad" is true" -- what does that mean other than to simply assert the first sentence? Then aren't we actually talking in terms of goodness and badness, and not in terms of truth? So what is truth doing here anyways? Making our commitments Real, and thereby more important?
This is the line of questioning that begins me thinking towards anti-realism on ethics. It seems to me that the heart of the matter isn't the same as the way the sciences work, and so it worth noting that there is a distinction to be made between moral truths -- if we wish to speak that way -- and truths of the natural world. I have a deep doubt of any claim to a science of ethics.
So harm (e.g. theft via hacking micro-transactions, betrayal of a country, rape of a coma patient or infant) happens to the victim only when it is observed by the victim? :chin:
Moral prescriptions (i.e. hypothetical imperatives – not "customary preferences", "emotional reactions", "subjective intuitions", etc) seem, except for implementation, indistinguishable from algorithms (i.e. adaptive rules). Caveat: not all algorithms are moral and not all morals are algorithms.
Nonetheless, if algorthms (i.e. If x, then y; therefore ought to z in order to prevent / mitigate either x and/or y) are necessarily "mind-dependent facts", then when generated by programs without minds, algorthms are not "normative facts"? This conclusion doesn't make sense.
I will repeat what l said earlier on and add clarification to it
"Do not harm others" or in general "X is bad" does not supervene on any natural fact apart from the linguistic + non-linguistic practices in a community. These practices are shaped by non-moral natural facts ( evolutionary adaptability ) and historical/cultural circumstances.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine if we lived in a planet where torturing the elderly helped our adaptability, for whatever reason, then we would have evolved to see torturing the elderly as good. We will still have meta-ethics and normative ethics in that planet , but we would look at an old man and think, it's good to torture him.
If this is too difficult to imagine. Then just look at how historical and cultural circumstances change many moral facts.
Do you believe some religious people claim "Homosexuality is bad" because "bad" supervenes over "homosexuality" ?
Or does "good" supervene over "Homosexuality" for progressives ?
Or maybe, progressives relate to a different cultural/historical memes compared to religious people ? This is the simplest explanation
If not, then l will wait till eternity for you to explain which defective cognitive faculty in religious people or progressives makes them make the wrong judgment. Is this cognitive faculty mysterious and undetectable ?
Changing recognition of facts (e.g. "cultural / historical lineages") do not change facts as facts. Ignorance afflicts both "religious people" and "progressives" alike so the cognitive faculty is neither "defective" (as you suggest) nor "mysterious and undetectable". The difference is that "religious people" (i.e. supernaturalists) tend to eschew techniques of rational self-correction (i.e. learning) – relying on fallacious appeals to tradition, authority, popularity, incredulity, etc – much more than "progessives" (i.e. naturalists) do.
... rather than address the questions I put to what you said earlier. How tedious. :roll:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/855846
Quoting Banno
A fact is typically defined as a statement that can be proven to be true or false based on evidence or reality.
There are no moral facts because moral statements aren't testable claims, there's no possibility of proof.
Your logic doesn't appear to work as-is. Even if facts are true statements, that wouldn't mean any true statement is a fact. A true statement of "one ought not to kick puppies for fun" would only be a fact if all true statements were facts. Isn't that right? So, is your claim that all true statements are facts?
Your use of the term "moral realism" seems equivalent to what most philosophers mean by moral cognitivism, and your use of the term "moral antirealism" seems equivalent to what most philosophers mean by moral noncognitvism. Yours isn't the standard terminology.
See here:
Or if you don't like Wikipedia then see here:
Sirius is arguing against moral realism as described above, not against moral cognitivism in general.
The big problem here is you begin with the assumption that, not only do mind-independent moral facts exist, but that we can arrive at all true moral facts with your flavor of critical reasoning. Take Elizabeth Anscombe, an incredibly intelligent lady who was well versed in philosophy, a literary executor of Wittgenstein, and largely responsible for reviving virtue ethics in the 20th century. She was vehemently opposed to abortion, which many other philosophers regard as good.
From my perspective, l don't need to take sides at all. But l can say, the catholic background of Anscombe influenced her decision, whereas the progressive/feminist tradition informs the decision of many philosophers who support abortion.
This has to do with the philosophy of disagreement.
If your epistemic peers, with similar evidence, reasoning abilities, dedicated time, self-criticism + other criteria, disagree on X, then you should suspend our judgment on X
Moral realists reject 1 and/or 2.
To prove moral realism wrong you must prove 1 and 2 true. You haven't done so, only asserted them.
Although it would help if you could explain what you mean by naturalism. Do you mean physicalism? If so, what of mathematics?
First thought:
“…. Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue, and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behaviour….”
(T. H. N., 3. 1. 1. “Morals Not Derived From Reason)
Subsequent paradigm shifts in moral philosophy demonstrate that no matter what necessarily regulates our conduct, it is not sufficient in itself to explain those factual occasions where manifest conduct does not conform to it. That being the case, Hume’s argument with respect to mere sentiment in general, and its regulatory power over our conduct, is falsified, insofar as under those conditions, rather than no ought follows from an is, it is the case an ought is all that can follow from an is.
————
Second thought:
The concept of “fact”, the primary intended meaning of that which the word represents, being empirical, shouldn’t be adjoined to that human condition having no definitive empirical predication whatsoever. Thus, it isn’t so much that there are no moral facts, but that the notion of moral facts doesn’t make any sense. As it happens, explanatory gaps in moral philosophy are conceptually relieved by exchanging fact for disposition, or…..yikes, dare I say?…..imperative.
End thoughts.
I have no problem, fundamentally, with this (other than labeling it as a moral realist position) because it didn’t specify the mind-independent fact of ‘one ought not harm another’ as morally signified. My argument doesn’t negate the possibility of normative facts—just moral facts.
If you think I am wrong, then what signification of ‘moral’ language would the moral realist, in this situation, be using other than using it to signify ‘what one ought to be doing’?
My argument did not posit that facts are only about material things or sense data.
Correct. Saying that "T is a normative fact" is not itself giving a prescription (as far as I can tell), and P2 is always going to take that form, and will supplement P1 to get the conclusion. If I am missing something, then I would love to hear your thoughts!
Those examples don’t make sense to me (and perhaps I am simply misunderstanding): for example, traffic signs exist and that is a fact; but that there should be traffic signs is not a fact. Are you saying the latter is also a fact? This seems to be the crux of what you are saying (as far as I understand).
Fair enough. A 'fact', for intents of the argument in the OP, is 'a statement of which its referent corresponds correctly to something in reality'; or I would be also fine with simply defining it as 'a statement which expresses something that exists mind-independently'. Facts refer to something objective (i.e., mind-independent). Either way, I think that suffices for the argument.
I am not sure what is being argued here, but I agree, and my argument in the OP agrees, that there is a possibility for normative facts: they just aren't moral facts.
My argument only gets one to moral anti-realism, and doesn't speak about moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism. Personally, I am a moral subjectivist, so I agree that moral judgments are truth-apt.
:up:
Let me know if you have any further thoughts!
The point of the argument in the OP is essentially what you described: if we are to take 'moral' language to signify 'what one ought to be doing', then it isn't enough to simply prove the existence of normative facts--and I think many moral realists just skip over this like it isn't an issue (and perhaps it isn't and I am mistaken).
I didn’t quite follow this: it is not sufficient to explain manifest conduct that does not conform to it in what manner?
I would say that our own sentiments is exactly what regulates our behavior, even if the ‘ego’ is not aware of it. It is a manner of ‘strong vs. weak wills’--as Nietzsche put it.
We can most certainly fight most of our yearnings for pleasures and what not, but fighting it is itself a manner of willing it—wanting it.
This is interesting, but why think that prescriptions only can follow from descriptions? That doesn’t seem correct to me at all.
I agree: so where does that leave moral realism, then? As opposed to normative realism?
Okay, but this would be an implication of the assertion of P2, not its primary sense. Getting away from the OP for a moment, consider two syllogisms. The first is of <this form>, the second is explicitly Humean in form:
S1: Walking the dog is a normative fact.
S2: All normative facts are volitional.
S3: Therefore, walking the dog is volitional.
H1: One ought to walk their dog.
H2: Fred is Hanover's dog.
H3: Therefore, Hanover ought to walk Fred.
I think there is an important way in which S1 differs from H1 vis-à-vis normativity, and this is seen by looking to the conclusions. S is not a practical syllogism, for it prescribes no course of action. H is a practical syllogism. This remains true even once we admit that S1 implies the truth that dogs ought to be walked. It is not necessarily the same thing to say, "It is true that dogs ought to be walked," and, "Walking the dog is a normative fact," even if the latter implies the former.
What would it mean for a fact to be moral? Do these two propositions mean different things?
1. one morally ought not harm another
2. one non-morally ought not harm another
If so then let's just rephrase my previous comment:
A moral realist might claim that the statement "one morally ought not harm another" is made true by the mind-independent fact that one morally ought not harm another (much like someone might claim that the statement "electrons are negatively charged particles" is made true by the mind-independent fact that electrons are negatively charged particles).
To be sure, a ritual for American vegans on Thanksgiving! Free the turkeys . . .
While I slept my tofu-heavy sleep, this discussion has done really well for itself. I am no longer sure of my position here. “Legitimate ambiguity,” as Leontiskos puts it, now seems about right to me on the entailment question. So just one more comment: Could the ambiguity lie in the fact that we haven’t specified the universe of discourse – the objects over which we want our predicates to range?
Let me explain (coughs nervously and consults his old logic notes). Statements are perhaps best understood, for logical purposes, as not existing in the world of space and time – the old logical distinction was “subsistent” vs. “existent”. So we could, following this idea, quantify either over the universe of space/time objects, or over a different set, in this case the set of statements, or facts. My original reading of Bob Ross’s syllogism was that it quantified over both things and statements, whereas Banno’s objection is that we have to take it as referring only to things or states of affairs -- the subjects of facts, rather than the facts themselves, which are of course statements. There is a vast literature on quantifier variance which I’m only casually familiar with, but here is the difference, as I understand it, for our purposes:
If we exclude statements as bound variables in themselves, then “X is a normative fact” and “It is true that X is a normative fact” are equivalent. This is Banno’s position, if I’m understanding him correctly. But if we allow statements into our universe of discourse, we get a different interpretation. “X is a normative fact” and “The statement ?X is a normative fact’ claims to state a truth” now say two different things, because they quantify over different ranges, in the first case a state of affairs, and in the second case a statement. I don’t think we’d need to know, or claim, anything about the truth of the statement in order to talk about it, provided we allowed ourselves to talk about statements at all as a separate class.
I think the example often given of this (I’m taking it from Copi & Gould’s Readings on Logic) is: “Sentences having ?ghosts’ as a subject-term are not really about ghosts . . . but about some people’s statements about ghosts, or perhaps certain ideas about ghosts.” Substitute “normative fact” for “ghost” and this makes the case pretty well, though C&G say (or said, in 1972) that this interpretation can lead to several “odd consequences.” And, thinking it through, I'm unsure whether it requires the presumption that the subject-term doesn't exist, which moral realists would deny.
That said, I am an indifferent logician at best, and I’m open to correction here by my betters.
As for moral facts, I also think there are such things, but emphatically disagree that demonstrating their existence is as easy as Banno says:
That one ought not kick puppies for fun is a moral statement.
It is a true statement that one ought not kick puppies for fun.
Facts are true statements.
Therefore there are moral facts.
The second premise merely imports the conclusion, thus begging the question. If there were no moral facts, then premise 2 couldn’t be true. But if it is “a true statement” that we shouldn’t kick the puppies, then this true statement is a moral fact. Circular, no? How have we established that premise 2 is a true statement? Is it meant to be obvious? But if it were, then we’d already know there are moral facts, and thus no proof would be required.
Let's keep it simple.
Electrons are negatively charged particles. How do I verify (or falsify) this?
One ought not murder. How do I verify (or falsify) this?
Assume that we can verify that electrons are negatively charged particles but cannot verify that one ought not murder. What then? Perhaps:
One ought not assert a claim that one cannot verify.
But then how do I verify (or falsify) this?
This seems like philosopher babble to me. Take a statement (divorced from its actual use in discourse - itself problematic), "torturing babies for fun is wrong!" Everyone that isn't a psychopath just agrees, and leaves it at that, but the philosopher must know *what* makes it true - is there a stance independent normative realm the statement flies out and corresponds with?? And if not must the statement then be actually false???? AHHHH!!!
People don't have metaethical commitments when they use moral language. Philosophers take individual utterances eg "x is wrong" and build entire worlds out of them to the point you can reach a conclusion like "torturing babies for fun is wrong" is actually a false statement. Its just idiotic.
You know how a normal conversation goes? Someone says you shouldn't do x because x is wrong. The person responds why is it wrong? What you DONT do is go into some metethical tirade about stance independent normative facts and get into a debate on their existence or not. No you just explain in the typical manner, "x is wrong because it causes y type of harm or negative outcome" and the person may either come round to your conclusion or not. That's how moral language works. I don't know what the philosophers are doing.
Where do I make this"assumption"? Stop making shit up.
Like Anscombe, I was raised and educated in Roman Catholicism until I attended university and I "support abortion" as many current and former Catholics do. So what. Wtf are you talking about? This has nothing to do with my previous reply to you.
Quoting Inyenzi
:up:
Trying to make sense of and justify the many things we simply take for granted.
For my argument, I was using ‘moral’ language as signifying ‘that which one ought to be doing’.
Yes, with respect what I regard as ‘moral’ signification, the word ‘morally’ is signifying in #1 that this is something you actually ought to be doing (and, in this case, more specifically, that you should not be harming others).
#2 is just, at best, a normative fact; i.e., some prescription which exists mind-independently. From that normative fact, it simply does not logically follow that you ought to do it. Another example is, ‘one ought to eat food’: arguably, this is a normative fact, since this obligation is embedded into both of our biology—but does that mean it is moral to do so? No.
That is how the story goes...but, this use of ‘moral’ is not signifying ‘what one ought to do’; because it does not follow from any normative fact that one ought to do it. So I would rephrase your statement here as:
Great post J!
Although I am not sure that I fully followed, let me try to adequately respond and you let me know if I am on the right track.
It seems as though you are positing these two examples as of two competing and mutually exclusive views of quantifying ‘things’ with propositions; but I am failing to see them as a true dilemma (with relation to each other): I accept both of your examples.
“X is a normative fact” is equivalent to “it is true that X is a normative fact” because “it is true” is superfluous; and “the statement ‘X is a normative fact’ claims to state a truth’” is different then ‘X is a normative fact’ because, as you noted, the former is referencing a statement about the latter—once we strip away the linguistic aspects (e.g., ‘is true’, in this case, isn’t superfluous linguistically in ‘the statement “” is true’ just because of how English is setup), we find that they are different propositions simply because they are references two different ‘things’.
Furthermore, I don’t see how propositions referencing ‘statements’ is any different than referencing ‘states of affairs’ (other than obviously a state of affair is not a statement): they are still valid propositions.
Finally, I don’t see how my syllogism (in the OP) is contingent on accepting these ‘statement’-style propositions: “T is a normative fact” is not itself referencing a statement—it is, rather, referencing a fact. To make it analogous (in my mind), you would have to refurbish “T is a normative fact” to “the statement ‘T is a normative fact’ is true” to make the proposition reference a statement.
Let me know if I am on the right track (with respect to what you were trying to convey).
I don't understand the distinction between something I ought to do and something I actually ought to do.
But fine, using your language:
A moral realist might claim that the statement "one actually ought not harm another" is made true by the mind-independent fact that one actually ought not harm another (much like someone might claim that the statement "electrons are negatively charged particles" is made true by the mind-independent fact that electrons are negatively charged particles).
So, the confusion, I think, is in the ambiguity of ‘I ought to do something’: that could be an expression of a normative fact or non-fact. The point is that when anyone states “There exists a normative fact that expresses ‘I ought to do something’” it does not follow that ‘I ought to do something’.
So I can regress your elaboration (again) validly into:
The proposition “there is a normative fact such that ‘one actually ought not harm another’” does not entail, if true, that “one actually ought not harm another”; and this is Hume’s Guillotine in a nutshell. If you say “one actually ought no harm another” and this is a normative fact, this is just a more ambiguous way of saying “there is a normative fact such that ‘one actually ought not harm another’”.
I think I may see what you are saying now. I would say that every normative fact, T, can be and honestly probably should be rewritten as "There is a normative fact T" (or something similar to that) because it disambiguates the conversation.
If I create major premise, P1, that is "I ought not kill people", it is not clear if the truthity of that statement is subjective or objective: it could go either way. But, if we are being technical, it should be "I believe that I ought not kill people" if it is subjective and "There is a normative fact T" if it is objective. Then it isn't so confusing why I might say that there being a normative fact "I ought not kill people" does not entail that "I ought not kill people". Does that help?
This is the sort of post that requires either five thousand words or something brusque and undiplomatic. I don't have time for five thousand words.
There are quite substantive problems with this approach.
The most obvious is that there simply is not a common use of "true" that exclusively applies to the natural world, nothing in the OED or Macquarie that comes even close.
And the reason for that is that it's a philosopher's conceit, a herniated remnant of logical positivism.
Nor does the idea have any credibility. "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is true; the remainder of your post shows that you agree that it is true. You sensibly wish ethics to work in a way quite different to science, but throw out the babe.
Indeed, adopting the proposal that ethical statements are not truth-apt is a way not of highlighting ethics but of reducing it so it may be thrown out of consideration. If ethical propositions are not truth apt, they cannot take a place in logic, and hence are outside of rational consideration.
So, please, reconsider.
Yep.
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
But no one listens to Lennon any more.
I don't really care what label folk put on the titular view. My concern is simply that folk accept that there are moral truths. I don't see that the syllogisms in the OP amount to very much of anything, actually. Quoting Michael
I don't think I addressed @Sirius...?
I was considering this possibility as well, but I decided not to run with it. I tend to think there is something subtly mistaken about it, but I cannot put my finger on it.
Quoting J
I think this is also slightly off, but working from the idea:
G1: Anyone who sees a ghost gets an eerie feeling.
G2: Those who experience an eerie feeling often get goosebumps.
G3: Therefore, those who see a ghost often get goosebumps.
The point here is that the syllogism works whether or not we put "ghost" in scare quotes and make it overtly perceptual. That is, one will agree with the syllogism whether or not they believe ghosts exist. Technically we might say that G is overdetermined, and works whether we are talking about objective states of affairs or subjective statements. It seems to me that is much the point: prescinding from one or more implications in favor of a different implication. "But I don't think ghosts exist," isn't necessarily a legitimate objection to G.
For <me> such an ambiguity could be resolved not only by further specifying the terms, but alternatively by understanding the syllogism's conclusion and form. As I said earlier, one could leverage a normative claim in a non-normative manner.
But it is worth noting that Banno's objection to the OP is definitive insofar as the OP was not trading in any of these more complicated things we are now discussing.
Okay, that is somewhat helpful, but the other problem is that you don't seem to present any arguments for your position in the OP. Your whole thesis rests on a single sentence:
Quoting Bob Ross
This is really just an assertion. Else, what rule of inference are you using to arrive at this conclusion? What in the OP supports such a conclusion? The word "taste" appears exactly once in your OP, and this in itself is evidence that your conclusion is not the result of an argument.
P2 is "P2: T is a normative fact.". That is, "T is true adn T is normative". To be a fact is just to be true. And to be true is just to be a fact.
S1: Walking the dog is a normative fact.
vs.
H1: One ought to walk their dog.
IF S1 were "walking the dog is a normative sentence", then their truth value might differ. S1 would not then be a normative truth. "Walking the dog is a normative sentence" does not imply "One ought to walk their dog"
But saying it is a fact is saying that it is true. Hence "Walking the dog is a normative fact" implies "Walking the dog is a normative truth" and implies "One ought to walk their dog".
I'm repeating myself, but I don't see how what you have set out addresses what I have set out.
Quoting Banno
Let me clarify the post you were responding to. Consider the original proposition and two inferences:
Now we agree that P2 implies both I1 and I2 when considered in itself. But with reference to <my previous post>, H involves both I1 and I2, whereas S really involves only I2. S2 and S3 depend not on the facticity of S1, but rather on the normativity of S1. This is why I said in another post that one is "prescinding from one or more implications in favor of a different implication" (). Again, the key is that, "S1 differs from H1 vis-à-vis normativity, and this is seen by looking to the conclusions..." ().
Similarly, we could have a premise, "Lightning McQueen is a red car." The predicate of course involves two notions (red+car). An argument could utilize this premise on the basis of both notions simultaneously, but it could also leverage only a single notion in a way that prescinds, partially or wholly, from the other one.
Just because something is a fact or a car does not mean that every piece of reasoning about that thing must be based on its facticity or carness. Bringing this back to the original question, the same applies to normativity. Something which is normative can be thought and reasoned about in non-normative ways (e.g. even though S1 implies H1, H1 is at best accidental to the conclusion S3).
* Note that I do not accept the idea that 'truth' and 'fact' are exact synonyms. The word 'fact' has a long and interesting history, but it has never been simply equated with 'truth', or 'individual truth'. Nevertheless, I am going to ignore this tangent for the moment.
I’m no closer to following you.
What is it you are arguing for?
Edit. Or perhaps I might ask if and how you suppose the op argument works? Because it doesn’t seem to do anything. I’m not even sure it is well formed.
Is that because you do not think that a fact is typically defined as a statement that can be proven to be true or false based on evidence or reality?
Yours is an eccentric use of the word, and you should know that perfectly well...
You know the meaning the term "moral fact" conveys but undermined that meaning by how you've understood the term. By your understanding, a moral fact is nothing more than a moral statement one agrees with. That's quite misleading and deceptive.
Can you provide an example of a truth that is not a fact?
Or perhaps a fact that is not true?
Why is it wrong to do that?
That's funny. Are you really saying "lmao your dumb" on a philosophy forum?
To be true is a prerequisite for being a fact.
Statements that are true but not facts:
"Coffee is delicious, and a great way to start the day"
"Cockroaches are disgusting and terrifying"
"Germany is a wonderful country to visit"
"I tried shopping at a market near me, but everything was overpriced"
Examples of true statements that aren't facts are statements that have truth conditions that depend on the personal circumstances of the speaker. Whether something is "disgusting" or "terrifying" differs by person, so a statement with such words won't be referred to as a fact, generally speaking.
Yeah, sorry, got mixed up with another discussion. I meant Bob Ross.
Quoting Banno
That's fine, but there can be a big difference between the various ways that such truths are understood. Consider mathematics; both mathematical realists and mathematical ant-realists believe that there are mathematical truths, but there is a distinction between the Platonism of mathematical realism and the formalism of mathematical anti-realism. Or consider an example from the SEP article: there is a distinction between a diamond being made of carbon and a diamond being worth £1,000.
The question many want an answer to is if moral truths are comparable to Platonism/a diamond being made of carbon (realism), or to formalism/a diamond being worth £1,000 (anti-realism).
I'm not stating the former proposition; I'm stating the latter.
One actually, absolutely, really, categorically, objectively, super duper, ought not harm another.
Why are electrons negatively charged?
I don't think there's a meaningful answer to the question. Some things are simply fundamental, brute facts about the world. Explanations have to come to an end somewhere.
Better questions are: "how do you know that it's wrong?" or "how can one verify that it's wrong?".
Would that I could! These are genuine doubts on my part, though. I'd say that it's error theory which demonstrates how ethical propositions can be truth-apt, but false. So they can take on logical forms but they cannot form sound inferences. My thought is that if this were not so there'd be a way we could demonstrate moral truths -- but instead it seems to me that we're stuck with simply asserting them. This reminds me of declarations of faith in Christ more than it reminds me of logical inference.
But I'm not willing to let go of the importance of ethics -- in fact I think it's central. So a lot of my thinking in this area has been to attempt to understand how it is ethics is important, how it's still part of a rational inquiry, and yet does not rely upon truth -- or at least, if it does, attempting to understand the manner in which it does.
Further I think that by relying upon moral facts, in particular -- maybe truths is better -- we run the risk of scientism. Another part of my motivation is my doubt that a science of ethics is possible, and I think that talking of moral facts gives more credence to the idea of a science of ethics than it should.
:up:
:cool:
Sentences are not the bearers of moral worth. Actions are. Whether the sentence is true or false isn't important -- what we do is what's important, and actions are not truth-apt because they are not propositions.
If error theory is correct then moral language is a kind of important fiction. And I note faith because I'm wondering if it's similar to the important fiction, for some, of the belief in God. Isn't moral worth a common point for people who believe in God? Then in what way is our moral deliberations different?
It's important to me that they are different if we want to claim that they are real, because I'm an atheist. I simply cannot believe there is a God in the world I live in.
So I'm happy to entertain the notion of a non-scientific moral realism. But then I want to know what that theory is such that we're not just asserting our convictions.
Dunno, don’t care. I don’t bother with -isms or -ists that confound more than confine. Dunno how to answer where is moral realism left when there’s no non-arbitrary meaning for what moral realism is, insofar as there is no irreducible consensus for what either moral, or real, is.
The ask in the OP was for thoughts; I gave mine, and admittedly, they will have very little in conjunction with the rest of the commentary.
I think this is an unfair and uncharitable interpretation of the OP: I clearly outlined how I think Hume’s Guillotine, if true, provides us sufficient reasons to believe that there are no moral facts.
I said:
And:
From the above, it follows that what is grounding what one ought to be doing is (ultimately) derived from a prescriptive non-fact (which is just what I was referring to by a taste):
If we can only validly justify any given prescription, fact or not, that we confirm as true with a (ultimately) a non-fact, then what is truly informing us what we ought to do is that non-fact (or set of non-facts).
If you want a syllogism, then I could put it this way:
P1: If Hume’s Guillotine is true, then ‘what one ought to do’ is determined by a set of non-factual prescriptions.
P2: Hume’s Guillotine is true.
C1: Therefore, ‘what one ought to do’ is determined by a set of non-factual prescriptions.
P3: ‘What one ought to do’ is the subject matter of morality.
P4: ‘what one ought to do’ is determined by a set of non-factual prescriptions.
C2: Therefore, morality is determined by a set of non-factual prescriptions.
And, the same line of thinking, can result in morality being simply non-factual prescriptions.
Please put it in a syllogism so that I can see where you are coming from. Saying "One ought not harm another" truthity could be subjective or objective: I need to know your line of reasoning in valid logical form. I think it is going to bottom out at a morally non-factual prescription: one cannot validly infer from a description that there is this normative fact that you ought to abide by it--and I think this is the crux, that has to be true, for your argument to work.
“Electrons objectively, mind independently, are negatively charged particles” is true because electrons objectively, mind independently, are negatively charged particles.
“One objectively, mind independently, ought not murder” is true because one objectively, mind independently, ought not murder.
I think I see what you mean: technically, I did not provide an argument for my conclusion (in a valid syllogistic form) but, rather, just explained it in english. So I amended my OP with the full argument at the bottom. Please let me know which premise you disagree with.
If you can't provide a syllogism, then how am I to know you have a logically valid argument? Honestly, I don't think you do: you are going from 'this statement is true because it corresponds properly to reality', therefore 'I ought not do whatever is in that statement'--which isn't logically valid.
E.g.,:
If I parse this into a valid deductive argument, I get:
P1: ???
P2: “One objectively, mind independently, ought not murder” is true because one objectively, mind independently, ought not murder.
C: Therefore, one ought not murder.
The prescription C does not follow from the description P2.
Glad my post was helpful. Yes, I think you’re on the right track, and let me say again that I am not Prof. Logic and can easily get muddled up myself.
The two ranges of possible variables aren’t mutually exclusive in any deep sense. We just have to specify them. I think there used to be an idea of a “universal class” which was supposed to mean “everything,” but that’s no help. We need to know, in any given formula, what the existential quantifier is quantifying over. (I’m going to use capital E rather than the reversed E cos it’s easier.) ?Ex’ is paraphrased as ?There exists an x such that . . .” or words to that effect. But absent an agreement on what “existence” is going to cover, we’re left with all sorts of ambiguities and puzzles. Quine said, famously, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” This way of stating it shows, I think, that what counts as “being” or “existing,” for logical purposes, is up to us. There’s no prior, obvious, “right” definition of what “exist” means – and that’s certainly been historically true in philosophy.
And yes, valid propositions can be constructed using either or both of the suggested quantifier ranges – you can say true things about both states of affairs and statements.
Now here is where you’re off track a bit: You say, “ ?T is a normative fact’ is not itself referencing a statement – it is, rather, referencing a fact.” But the viewpoint I’m advocating makes a sharp distinction between “facts” and “states of affairs.” The rain outside isn’t a fact, it’s a state of affairs. The proposition “It is raining”, if true, is a fact. (See Wittgenstein: “The world is the sum of facts, not of things.” I think this is wrong – and so did he, eventually – but he’s using the distinction in the same way.) So, when you reference a statement, you’re also referencing a (potential) fact, but not a state of affairs. And this is exactly where we’ve all been debating. Let’s substitute “true statement” for “fact.” We get ?T is a normative true statement’, and what we want to know is whether asserting this is equivalent to asserting the truth of T.
If we’re allowed to use statements as bound variables – that is, if Ex can quantify over “facts” and “statements”, not just “objects” or “states of affairs” -- then it looks like we can quote the statement without committing ourselves to its truth, or even to whether it’s true-or-false. But if only states of affairs can count as existing, then we have to make what is (to me) an awkward translation – and the exact way to do this is, again, what we’re kicking around. Should we say ?(Ex) n(x)’, with ?n’ meaning normative? But if x can’t be a statement or a fact, how do we translate this? What would it mean for a state of affairs to be normative? What are we predicating normativity of?
Lastly, yes, the “refurbishment” you suggest makes the question even sharper – but of course it firmly commits us to quantifying over statements.
Where I would like some help is in understanding whether Banno's objection, quoted above, must be correct. Are we making a normative statement in the sense that we're talking about truth, or in the sense that we're talking about whatever the normative behavior is? Does it require both truth and normativity to create a normative statement? Have I even made a meaningful distinction? I think so, but . . . see above re my logical competence.
Either way, on this view, trying to demonstrate a moral fact, or prove its existence, would be bootless. We don’t need arguments, we need . . . what to call it? A certain kind of hermeneutics, I guess, that includes a built-in interpretation. You either see it or you don’t. So if this is right, it’s very confusing why radical skepticism about morality could continue, among brilliant thinkers. What part of this did Nietzsche not understand? Was J. L. Mackie unfamiliar with the linguistic practices of his community?
I’ll stop there, and only add: I don’t believe there are definitive answers to be found on this question within philosophy, but we have to keep asking. May I quote T. Nagel, one of my faves? “[Problems like this] are probably not soluble, but they are irresistible, and the attempt to solve them has yielded over the history of the subject, and continues to yield, brilliant and fascinating philosophical responses and theories, all of which have something wrong with them.”
I'm basically arguing for 's claim. I don't think it has anything to do with the OP (). Again, I think your arguments against the OP are sound. What I am doing here is tangential. All of the interesting parts of this thread are tangential.
Quoting J
...Or to be a bit more precise, I would say that we can reasonably speak about normative realities in non-normative ways.
So this could have been summed up by, "I agree with Hume." Yet the forum is filled with critiques of Hume. I thought you were attempting to go beyond Hume in one way or another.
Quoting Bob Ross
Okay, thanks. That is clear enough.
As I said in my first reply to you, you are begging the question. P2-A is the contentious premise, and it receives no defense/justification. You responded to me by setting out an interpretation of what a fact is. Now what you need to do is use that interpretation to flesh out an actual argument in favor of P2-A. Only once you do that will moral realists have something to interact with.
Edit: This seems to be your argument in a simplified form:
(2) needs to be defended by something more than a mere appeal to Hume.
:D
It's kind of funny to me because my interpretation of N is in conflict with Mackie. But they are also a bit disparate, in terms of time and place, so it's more notional. I'd say that N is the uber-anti-nihilist rather than a nihilist. The way I read him is as a heroic attempt to overcome nihilism in light of the death of God.
Played swapsies. No point in being at the bottom when you can be at the top.
Quoting Leontiskos
Nor do I, and that's not what I have been suggesting. I am pointing out that there is a truth functional equivalence between them. P is true IFF P is a fact.
Quoting Michael
I agree. From the concurrent thread on deriving an ought form an is:
Quoting Banno
Direction of fit does a much better job of differentiating ought from is, than a simplistic, scientistic refusal to acknowledge that ought statements, and moral statements generally, have a truth value. It has the advantage of displaying the difference of intentionality.
Now the logical characteristic of antirealism is that one way or another it rejects divalent logic. That is, it claims that, one way or another, there are other truth values besides true and false. I am not here rejecting that possibility. There may be some benefit in using a non-standard logic in Ethics.
My gripe is with the first sentence of this thread: Quoting Bob Ross
The phrase I have bolded is much stronger than antirealism. It claims that there are no moral facts. My simple argument shows this to be wrong.
Quoting Banno
it's a commonplace that an evaluation (a 'normative' statement) must be assumed in any argument with a normative conclusion. A close look at Ross' argument shows that he assumes that normative statements are not factual at P1.
It surprises me that no one else¹ has pointed this out.
He doesn't prove his thesis; he assumes it, then allows it to ride into his conclusion on the back of normative statements.
He does this again, explicitly, in his updated version:
Quoting Bob Ross
Quoting Moliere
Why pay this any heed, when it is clear that there are moral facts, and that we can and do use them to make inferences? Mackie's argument from queerness just confuses being objective and direction of fit. We all agree that one ought not kick puppies for fun, and so objectivity is irrelevant. Quoting Moliere
But isn't "asserting our convictions" what we do in physics as well as morality? We engineer planes from what we believe to be true. Why shouldn't we do the same thing in Ethics?
¹ Appart form @Leontiskos
I understand, but I am saying that simply because there is a mind-independent fact that "one ought not harm another" it does not follow that it is of moral signification.
In a nutshell, “P2-A*1: If Hume’s Guillotine is true, then P2-A is true.” is going beyond Hume and, consequently, the entire argument: Hume never actually argued that moral facts cannot exist because of the is-ought gap, nor that normative facts cannot exist either.
Which premise begs the question?
A premise being controversial does not make it question begging. However, I did give justification for it:
Which ties right back into the neo-Humian analysis I gave at the top of the OP.
It seems like, and correct me if I am wrong, you are disagreeing with P2-A*1, no? The way I see it, you either have to deny that Hume’s Guillotine is true or that it entails that P2-A is true—but you didn’t attempt either of those in your response. Are you saying I need to provide another syllogism for P2-A*?
This isn’t my argument (and I think I gave a much more robust argument in my updated OP), but let me address some of the problems I see with it.
Firstly, I would clarify that in #1 “depends” means “direct contingency”. It is not enough that someone had to use their subjective values and intentions to argue that what was derived doesn’t latch onto something factual—otherwise everything would have to be a taste, which is not what I am arguing.
#2 is false in relation to my argument, because I am claiming that anything ‘moral’ signifies non-factual normative claims, and it is not that moral claims simply depend on non-facts. If ‘moral’ language signifies ‘what one ought to be doing’, then none of the normative facts I could provide myself carry with them ‘moral’ signification because they do not tell me what I ought to be doing, even if I grant them as true.
I am basically allowing, in my argument, for the moral realist to posit normative facts, but not letting them get off easy calling them moral facts—due to Hume’s Guillotine, they simply don’t supply us with what we ought to be doing (and most moral realists just skip over this). It is not enough for the moral realist to prove there are normative facts to prove there are moral facts—the latter does not necessarily follow from the former.
If you are referring to P2-A*1, then I can write out another syllogism for justifying that premise.
I suppose, if I am understanding correctly, that the ‘state of affairs’ would be the correspondent that T would be latching onto (i.e., referencing properly) if it is true. That’s how I would interpret it. If I am right (on that), then I don’t see any issue here. If one accepts that ‘T is a normative true statement’ is true, then T is true because the claim itself is that it is true—i.e., that it corresponds correctly to the ‘state-of-affairs’ you are talking about. What am I missing here?
I don’t see how it is possible to accept the proposition which expresses that a statement is true without thereby affirming the statement is true and thereby accepting whatever that statement references about reality (i.e., ‘state-of-affairs’). Is the idea that, if it were possible to only quantify over statements then someone could object to my argument by saying “T is a normative fact/statement” could be true and T be false?
To my understanding, T being a normative statement was meant to convey that T is a prescription which exists mind-independently, and the normative statement or fact-of-the-matter latches onto that existent prescription. I think, perhaps, the confusion lies in that (I guess) I am not using the term ‘statement’ the same as ‘fact’: the former is just an utterance we make which may not correspond to any state-of-affairs, whereas the latter does correspond correctly. So I probably should refrain from using ‘T is a normative statement’: it should be ‘T is a normative fact’.
I am not sure if I am completely following (admittedly), but let me give it a shot:
No, not at all! I can say “there is a state-of-affairs out there which contains a prescription such that ‘this being should eat X amount of food’” (S for short) without claiming that ‘this being should eat X amount of food’ (N for short): the former (S) is a mere observance of a prescriptive fact, carrying with it no normative utterance from myself (as the observer), and the latter (N) is an actually normative utterance (i.e., I am saying that this state-of-affairs should transpire). As far as I understand Banno here, to admit that S is true thereby commits that person to N, which I don’t see why that would be the case at all. Descriptions of prescriptions are not prescriptions.
Now, back to your questions about it:
What do you mean by “normative behavior” vs. “truth”? I would say that we are talking about, in the case of a normative fact, if a prescription exists mind-independently (which would be in the truth), and I don’t see how merely explicating a normative fact would entail any sort of normative behavior, in and of itself, from me nor anyone else (unless it is contrived out of confusion and ambiguity). There’s always going to need to be at least one other prescription, which is a non-fact, that is a hypothetical imperative.
I wouldn’t say so. It is possible, in principle, that one utters a prescriptive statement and it latches onto nothing in reality nor one’s own psyche, such that it isn’t truth-apt (e.g., emotivism). I am a moral cognitivist, but I don’t see how normativity, as a concept, is necessarily dependent on truth.
Moral anti-realism is the position that there are no true moral facts.
P2-A is derived from P2-A*, which you conveniently left out.
Also, P2-A is not the conclusion: that all prescriptive statements which dictate ‘what one ought to do’ are non-factual does not entail that all moral statements are non-factual. The whole argument I gave is required to get to that conclusion; and, again, P2-A is derived from P2-A*: it is not assumed.
Quoting Stanford
and
My bolding.
Again, "true fact" is redundant.
Quoting Bob Ross
P2-A* (fucksake!) is not an argument, it is an assertion. As has already been explained.
This strikes me as an important point in these conversations.
Quoting Banno
:lol:
---
Sure, you should try to defend P2-A*1 if that is how you wish to defend P2-A. Give us a persuasive reason to accept your thesis.
Yes, we need at least P2-A*1i and P2-A*1ii...
:grimace:
Quoting Banno
Right. I sketched a thread related to this idea and used part of it in <this post>.
Quoting Banno
Additionally, it is widely recognized that in epistemology there are simple truths and complex truths (e.g. Locke's simple and complex ideas). I don't see why this shouldn't also be the case when it comes to morality. It seems that Anscombe took things like, "Do not harm the innocent," to be something like simple moral truths, and I see no problem with this approach.
()
Quoting Leontiskos
This needs to be said far too frequently, and surprisingly most often to those who advocate some form of empiricism...
Shit, I'm going to need to grab my wristband pretty soon. (link) (link)
Mine look more like this...
All I see proven here is that one can convey their meaning while using words casually, liberally or dubiously.
While none of those "facts" you listed are actual facts, it's just a casual statement, no need to get bogged down in such details. When you use the word "fact" to make the claim that "moral facts" exist in the context of philosophy, then the nuances of the word are being emphasised, and in a context where nuance matters greatly.
What you have done with these examples though, is prove that indeed, in your eccentric usage of the word, statements with truth conditions that differ by person can be facts. This means that by your logic, "moral facts" are whatever moral statements a person agrees with, which completely undermines the term. Why should the term "moral facts" exist if all moral opinions are moral facts?
They are all well-formed sentences of English. What's eccentric here, if anything, is the insistence that there can be no moral truths.
Quoting Judaka
"Should"? The term exists and has a long standing place in English despite your misgivings.
Quoting Banno
By your understanding, valid and mutually exclusive facts co-exist since a statement can be true by one's preferences, interpretations and feelings. Even facts that are substantiated with no credible evidence, just one's aversion or preference for an animal are "facts". That understanding totally undermines how the word is used, there's nothing left to differentiate it from mere opinion.
Your stance would make sense if you were shitting on the term.
Quoting Banno
Did you miss the "if"?
My claim is that your stance completely undermines the word's purpose. A fact is on the same level as an opinion according to you. Moral statements always have truth conditions that differ by person, they cannot be proven or substantiated, and there's nothing else but opinion. It should be impossible for you to offer any "moral fact" that doesn't correlate 1:1 with your own opinion.
Certainly not. I don't think I've made any such claim. Cite me. Nor is that an implication of what has been said - if it is, show your argument.
Quoting Judaka
No. Did you not see the Ngram?
Take a step back and look again. Your argument is that moral truths are intractable, therefore you will save yourself some trouble by simply asserting that they do not exist.
What I have done is to show that there are true moral statements, however uncomfortable that makes you. What we do after and about that remains open.
Quoting Banno
You definitely didn't make the claim, but if statements that are true by the circumstances of each speaker are facts, then you're going to have logically valid answers that contradict each other. It can be a fact that cockroaches are terrifying and also a fact that they're not terrifying.
Quoting Banno
"Moral facts" or "moral truths", are just terms, just words. I'm not interested in whether they "exist". My view is that "moral truths" are meaningless and logically indistinguishable from opinion. I don't have an unconditional reverence for truth, the reasons are what's important.
Even if we lived in a society that was 100% devoted to the idea of moral truths, absolutely nothing would change, because moral truths are exactly 1:1 to opinion. "I think X is a moral truth (my opinion)" and you say "I think Y is a moral truth (your opinion)". Alternatively, "We agree X is a moral truth, but I think it applies to circumstance Z and you don't. And so on. That's exactly the same way that a society that adamantly rejected the notion of moral truths would act.
:up: :up:
The argument from difference gets me more than the argument from queerness. It strikes me that there would be more agreement if ethics were real. (not scientific, here, or even empirical or anything of that sort -- I've been trying to be careful in laying out the case).
I don't think it's as much of a "shouldn't" as a suspicion that it's not going to work the same way. The direction of fit is what marks the difference between physics and ethics while still using facts in our reasoning. But how would you demonstrate to someone that "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is different from "One ought to take the sacrament"? Direction of fit takes care of ought-statements. Which of all the moral propositions are the ones which should be considered?
Suppose there was a book of all the moral propositions which disagrees with our commitment. I don't think any of us would change our minds on how we should treat puppies just because we have the book of moral propositions. In fact I'd say we already have such a book in our culture and we call it The Bible yet we clearly don't interact with that book in the same way. So given that how is it that we make ethics work as a discipline based in fact, or at least makes us able to make cases and demonstrate their truths?
It's in the weeds that my doubts grow. Error theory is just a challenge to the notion that because we make demonstrations we can conclude that there are facts to the matter since there are other such ways of talking which do the same but which we wouldn't say are really factual. We're able to fool ourselves into thinking we're speaking about real things. How is it that we know ethical talk isn't just an important game of astrology?
And this is important because it could be why it is we disagree so deeply on ethical matters: if it's not factual then we're not going to be able to prove to someone else that they are wrong. And here I just mean demonstrable in a way other than merely agreeing that something is true. This turns ethics into a kind of race for ears or as a kind of game where we can prove our point; but I'd suggest that reading all the viewpoints is what makes one more capable of judging ethically. It's not truth and agreement as much as being willing to listen to another's viewpoint and finding what works that marks the path to a working ethic -- but in so doing that, and seeing how much disagreement there is, I feel doubt that there are truths as much as we're emotionally connected to some propositions. It's a matter of heart, so it seems to me.
But what's more this actually makes room for philosophy. It's because we cannot form a discipline where we have experts which generate knowledge of the ethical that the practice of philosophy remains relevant. We care about ethics, and reason about it, and even more so I think we like to be able to reason about it. Why else would there be so many tracts on right living if it weren't a concern of ours? But philosophy is that discipline which allows us to reflect upon the complicated things in life, and train our judgment.
I know it's counter-intuitive, but in a lot of ways anti-realism actually seems better for ethical talk than realism. The path of realism just has people trying to prove to one another that they are the better ones, and they were right all along, and its this impulse which anti-realism is good at taking the wind out of.
Coming in a little late on this, but help me out: I know you can't mean, literally, that everyone agrees that coffee is delicious. So what is the use of "fact" here? Are you saying that, if absolutely everyone really did agree about this, it would be a fact?
I wouldn't want to foreclose the possibility of moral realism. I'm not so sure it's necessarily wrong. But I think it worthwhile to either accept that it's a matter of faith -- a faith which we can then reason about, and even seem to benefit some from doing that -- or be able to articulate how it isn't a matter of faith.
Either the moral isn’t real as conditioned by fact, or, the moral is real but conditioned by non-empirical fact, a contradiction. For a non-empirical fact to carry non-contradictory implication yet retain certainty, it is merely a subjective truth, from which follows that the moral is real iff conditioned by subjective truths.
All of which solves nothing, in that it remains contentious that the merely subjective can be real, which reflects on whether the moral, when conditioned by subjective truths, can be real. But if morality is a human condition, in which every human of otherwise rational constitution thinks himself a moral character, and if every human in moral circumstance thinks himself as properly according himself to it, then it must seem to him that he really is a moral agent. Even so, it is still suspect that the moral in and of itself, is real, when it is the subject that merely thinks he is being moral by some self-determined expression of a condition intrinsic to his human nature.
So….where does that leave moral realism? In a great big pile of odiferous philosophical bullshit. There never was a need or a good reason to imbue the moral with the real, especially when the real had already been well-established as representing EXACTLY what the moral is not.
Which gets us, finally, to this: when, pray tell, did you ever, in any arbitrary, albeit immediate, moral circumstance whatsoever, make a statement about it? If you never did…and of course you actually never did….moral statements are nothing but cum hoc ergo propter hoc critiques or judgements of moral activity in general, from which follows it isn’t a case of the truth of the statements at all, but the correspondence of the moral activity to its critique or judgement. Now, the subject, to which both the act and the critique belong, must already be fully conscious of both and the truth is given regarding that correspondence, and for that subject to which the act does not belong but the statement does, for instance when someone not you makes statements about something you did, he cannot possibly be conscious to the same degree nor in the same manner, and therefore the truth in that correspondence cannot ever be given.
So say you do make a moral statement, not in immediate relation to a circumstance but before or after an act representing the circumstance. If before, it cannot be a true statement representing the act because the act hasn’t happened and may not happen, and if after, it is true statement only because the act made it so, which transfers the quality of “true statement” to mere “account”.
Yeahyeahyeah….I know. The word “statement” can be bastardized to represent “act”, in which case a moral statement is slipped sideways, shoehorned if you will, into representing a moral act, and from which it follows that any moral act is a moral statement. But here, we have the absurdity of an act being either one or the other moral or immoral immediately upon its implementation, an expression of morality itself, in juxtaposition to a statement being true or false with respect to an act being moral or immoral whether or not it is ever implemented, an expression relative possibility hence not of morality itself. The former is necessary, the latter contingent; they have no legitimate connection to each other, that irresponsible flights of fancy hasn’t heaped upon the unguarded.
Just another stupid language game, dreamed up by those who couldn’t improve what had already been done. Of which I could be similarly accused, so…..there ya go.
Who is this "we"? My college roommate hated coffee (although it's unlikely he's reading this). :razz: :grin:
What you quoted states that moral anti-realism comes in three general flavors (listed above): that’s what ‘disjunction’ signifies in that sentence you quoted—viz., a moral anti-realist either is amoral non-cognitivist, error theorist, or non-objectivist (i.e., subjectivist).
Correct, that’s why I don’t think stanford should have described the third moral anti-realist as ‘non-objectivism’, because that term is used in entirely different ways depending on the person. In the first quote (above), it is referring to subjectivism; in this quote (of yours) it is referring to non-naturalism.
That’s fine. Moral anti-realism, even by your sources (standford), is, at its basic level, the view that there are no moral facts.
What I was trying to convey with ‘true fact’ was just that error theorist do consider morality objective—just objectively false; but I understand this could be also conveyed with ‘objectively false that there are moral facts’.
It is absolutely an argument: it is a valid syllogism that has a major and minor premise meant to necessitate, if agreed as true, the conclusion. Which premise do you disagree with?
The difference is that in physics we are using our convictions to attempt at latching onto a fact-of-matter about the world; whereas, according to moral anti-realism, we not using convictions to get at moral facts-of-the-matter.
I think I am understanding more what you and @Banno are talking about—so I added an Updated 2 section to the OP. Let me know what you think.
This seems to me to be the nub of our differences. Opinions are not meaningless. If they are logically indistinguishable from moral truths (they are not...) then moral truths are not meaningless, either.
All I would show in this thread is that there are moral statements that have a truth value. The argument has two parts: there are statements that we think of as true or as false, that say how folk ought behave; and we make use of these statements in deductions.
My thesis here does not involve setting out a method for determining that truth or falsity.
That it is easier to reach agreement in physics than in ethics is not an argument for ethical statements not having a truth value.
We are repeating an argument that occurred after the war in Oxford and Cambridge, notably between Ayer and his intellectual children, and the "four women", Anscombe, Foot, Midgley and Murdoch. In the wake of the war, many philosophers could not accept the view that morals were no more than expressions of disquiet or preference. There was a renewed insistence on treating ethical themes rationally. This was part of the rejection of Positivism.
It's not so much a matter of faith as of grammar.
Quoting J
Well, yes. If everyone likes coffee, then it is a fact that everyone likes coffee.
Banno, we are both moral cognitivists. There's no need to give an argument on that for this OP (:
I agree that my original argument has been buried, but please address the new argument (since you are a moral realist): which premise do you disagree with?
Right. We agree this far. The fear, let's say, is that they are all of them false.
Quoting Banno
M'kay. Then all I can claim is it feels like faith because I'm uncertain, then.
But also I don't think I'd reduce ethics to expressions of disquiet or preference. Philosophy and rationality go hand in hand, and I think ethical philosophy a good thing to pursue, so I'm certainly not opposed to insisting on treating ethical themes rationally. I hold the same for the arts -- we can reason about the arts, but there even in our knowledge of these things we have to acknowledge it's not all truth and inference and deduction. But then I'm not sure what the role of truth is in evaluating art. I know it's important because this is how we think about things, but also there is something to be said for the performance or the heart in such matters too, and to note how artists have different movements which disagree with one another and we don't really think of Cubism, say, as true.
Ethics is the philosophy of the art of living, perhaps, though it covers more than that too in its course because we are concerned about many things as we deliberate on that question of how best to live or the right thing to do.
Quoting Banno
This is why astrology is a persuasive example to me. The astrologists think of the statements as true or false, and make use of the statements in deductions: it's at least possible for us to talk this way and believe it and it be false.
Now I believe astrology to have reasons for why it's false, and I think it differs from ethics so this is just to make the case against using arguments as a demonstration of truth.
It's just the sniggling suspicion that if there were real ethical principles then we'd probably agree a little more on some of the intractable problems. But that could just be a problem with us at the moment rather than something that will always be, so I don't argue to the point that there must not be moral facts or some such. Rather it's just that it seems like an art at this point.
Okay, thanks. Honestly, my sense is that you are somewhat new to philosophy and/or logic, so I am trying to do little more than give you nudges in the right direction for the better development of your ideas.
Quoting Bob Ross
This sounds to me like, "There are no moral facts."* Presumably if there are no moral facts then the moral realist is wrong, but this is still question-begging because it is asserting the very issue at stake. It is not conceivable that any moral realist would respond to your assertion by saying, "Oh, I see now. There are no moral facts. I am wrong after all!" Banno already addressed this issue in his very first post:
Quoting Banno
You responded:
Quoting Bob Ross
But why is it non-factual? (enter )
What's happening in this thread and in your threads generally is a shifting of the burden of proof. What begins as, "I am going to argue for moral antirealism," always ends up in, "Prove to me that moral realism is true!" I am not convinced that it has progressed beyond, "Moral facts don't exist." "Sure they do: here is a moral fact." "That's not a moral fact."
* Or, "There are no moral statements that are factual," where a 'moral statement' is a "subject-referencing prescriptive statement."
---
- :sweat:
Quoting Banno
I didn't say that they were...
Quoting Banno
Sure, they're not meaningless as opinions. That's good enough for me. The only value moral truths have is as opinions. I find your prioritisation of applicability over meaning and connotation to be misguided, but I'm satisfied with this ending.
Quoting Banno
I disagree that this is what is usually meant by "moral truth", but I agree with these two sentences, so I'll wrap up my involvement with that.
Fine.While I couldn't see how your ideas could be understood in a coherent fashion, it was fun making up a couple of counterexamples.
I'd say you need to think about yourself instead of displacing the question out onto others, such as astrologists. The claim is that, "there are statements that we think of as true or as false." This does not hold of astrology.
The crux here is that you hold to moral truths. You believe, "One ought not kick puppies for fun." The idea that
You seem to want to say, "Well, not enough people agree with me, so it probably isn't true." If you really think this is a good argument, then the rational course is to throw out all of your moral convictions. Throw out your prohibitions against kicking puppies, executing the innocent, treating people unjustly, etc. I think the reason it is so hard to take this step is because, among other things, it is highly irrational.
I think morality maps to other sciences more closely than is often admitted. Most people know that 2+2=4, even if they do not know <more complex mathematical truths>. Most people know that we should not execute the innocent, even if they do not know what is supposed to happen in the Middle East. Although it is easier to corrupt our moral intelligence than our mathematical intelligence, a lot of the opposition to moral realism is purely academic. Is there really much disagreement on things like, "One should not kill their newborn infant," or, "One should not lie without reason"?
Quoting Moliere
Astrology would be true if the words used were in line with the things in the world. So we would get true statements something like
Now it seems to me pretty clear that this is false.
(It might be tempting to think that the astrologer must say something like
but this doesn't do anything astrological; it makes no reference to the stars)
Antithetically, ethical truth does not set out how the world is, but how we are to act in the world. It's centrally about volition and action. SO it's not about how the world is, but what we might do in it.
So of course no fact about the world will demonstrate it's truth.
So we get a T-sentence such as
Now there are all sorts of ways to unpack this, or extend it...
or
or even
And each of these the direction of fit is reversed by the antecedent.
So the astrology analogue doesn't work.
That's a bit of a ramble, but it's after a heavy lunch.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think I agree, but with one caveat. It's not the believing that "one ought not kick puppies for fun" that renders it true.
And I think the Principle of Charity comes in to play here, as you hint, Leon. We agree more than we disagree. But especially in this area, it's the disagreement that gets the attention.
At least if we allow ethical statements to have truth values we can engage in a rational discussion. Reject ethical truth values and all there is, is violence.
Sure. I would have to revisit our conversation on belief, but what I meant is that Moliere holds the proposition to be true. Thus in the following sentence, "Moliere believes some moral propositions are true..."
In all fairness, I don't think the question of deciding 'what one should do' is necessarily the same as the question of whether 'what one should do' is a stance independent fact. Throwing out moral realism doesn't require throwing out prohibitions.
I wouldn’t say I am new to formal logic nor philosophy (or at least metaethics), but, perhaps, I am a newbie compared to however many years of experience you have in those fields. Nevertheless, I am always glad to hear any criticisms one may have of my views, so please do not hesitate to critique away! (:
I understand why it would seem that way, but in my argument “there are no moral facts” is not analytically equivalent to “there are no known subject-referencing prescriptive statements which are facts”: the former needs P2-A and P2-B, whereas the latter is one component of the equation to get to P2-A. Just because there are no known subject-referencing prescriptive statements which are facts, it does not strictly follow that there aren’t any; so I just emphasized at the end of the argument for P2-A (i.e., P2-A* and P2-A**) that one has no reason to believe there are any.
I agree that P2-A*2*2 is the premise that a moral realist is going to disagree with, but that is where my head is at now: I do not see any such subject-referencing prescriptive statements which are facts.
It isn’t though: just because there are no subject-referencing prescriptive statements which are facts, it does not strictly follow that there are no moral facts. Question-begging is when one assumes the truthity of the conclusion as its own premise.
I wasn’t expecting them to: I expected them to contest P2-A*2 (as I said in the OP) and, thereafter, P2-A*2*2.
That is not what I responded with:
My point (in a nutshell) is that P2 can be true and a statement without being a fact; because ‘one ought not kick puppies for fun’ should be ‘I believe that one ought not kick puppies for fun’.
But, Banno’s biggest problem is that we thinks moral cognitivism is equivalent to moral realism; which makes no sense, especially since I happen to be a moral cognitivist that is a moral anti-realist.
Originally, I was deploying Hume’s Guillotine to remove the possibility of moral facticity; now, I would just say that, although they are possible, I do not know, nor do I think anyone else knows, of any moral facts (P2-A*2*2). There’s not much more I can say past that, other than that I am have explored most of the literature in metaethics and don’t by any of the moral realist positions.
I am unsure as to whether this has happened in all my threads, but, yes, this has happened here. Leontiskos, I have no problem refurbishing my OP as good reasons surface for doubting it, and that is what has happened. I am only interested in the truth, and that I why I even put you and Banno’s valid concerns with my original argument in the OP: I want other people to be able to read my OP and be able to easily follow the conversation and where it is heading, so hopefully they can learn from my mistakes.
You are absolutely right that I am now hinging on P2-A*2*2, which inevitably signals a call to all moral realists to provide a counter to it, which is just to say that they seem to now have the burden of proof. I would say that there is nothing more I can say: what else can I say but that I do not know and I don’t think other people know of any subject-referencing normative facts?
Well, that is just the nature of metaethical debates! I say “nah”, you say “yeah”. You say “check this out”, I say “checked it out: don’t buy it”. I say “check this out”, you say “checked it out: don’t buy it”.
That is fair: I can probably condense the syllogisms to essentially:
P1: If we do not know of any moral facts, then we have no reason to believe them.
P2: We do not know of any moral facts.
C: Therefore, we have no reason to believe them.
Then, the moral realist will just contend P2.
So... what say you about P2?
I think what you say here gets at the doubts that I'm trying to express in philosophical form:
Quoting Bob Ross
It's whether or not we should call this knowledge that makes me doubt. In some sense if we don't have a knowledge of ethics then we are functionally nihilists, even if we believe there are true moral statements, because then what makes the decision is sentiment and attachment to this or that principle rather than a process of deliberation or a cadre of experts who know.
Quoting Banno
Oh I've been rambling myself in trying to pick through the thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to continue your side of the conversation. Perhaps I'll come to some better way of putting things through this talking.
Good points. I suppose the question would be is that if this difference is enough to warrant our belief in a knowledge of the ethical, since this is the doubt. Or, at least, is sometimes the doubt. Because you're right here:
Quoting Banno
I recognize there's agreement. But the depth of disagreement still gives rise to a belief that we're no longer talking about true things, at least sometimes, in spite of agreement. The desire is to avoid a conclusion like this: Quoting Banno
Because I certainly don't believe that all there is is violence. I want to say that even from an anti-realist perspective that wouldn't follow, else I wouldn't explore anti-realism! But that is certainly a belief we share that we ought to avoid in our reasoning that, at bottom, it's all violence.
I think we can use our words to come to resolutions without resorting to violence, and that this is a desirable thing. The appeal to heart is to note how there's no proof to be had, that is, no war to be fought in the name of a true cause. That is there's this use of moral realism which also yields the conclusion "it's all violence". This way of talking ethically where people want violence because they are in the right strikes me as a backwards ethics, but the language is the same. So we get some odd duck who persuades others
And you begin to wonder where the truth in it all is when the odd duck is persuasive.
Quoting Leontiskos
I think there are times when such propositions come to seem empty or at least people begin to redefine who counts as a person and who doesn't. But since it's our actions, rather than the words, which matter to me this is the sort of thinking that seems to want truth and violence and goodness. Perhaps it's this trifecta that bugs me. I can't square away that we ought to kill and call this a good and say it is true that we ought to kill. I can understand living in a world where violence is necessary, but I cannot then say that this world is a good one because my sentiments are largely peace-loving. And I think it's this intuition which gets along with @Bob Ross's use of the Guillotine -- in some sense I am committed to non-violence, and that's the sentiment what underpins my reasoning here. But not everyone is, and some people even think this is a poor way to go about things because it's not realistic in our world. So which is right, in accord with ethical knowledge?
It seems like something of a judgment call to me that has no truth to it. In a way it's where my ability to reason on the situation breaks.
And I suppose this is why I find statements like ""One ought not kick puppies for fun" is true" as unpersuasive. Sure, but It's the hard questions that give me pause, not the points of agreement. And our love of puppies does nothing to speak to our, what appears to me, thirst for violence.
Quoting Leontiskos
Heh. I think this is to be avoided. My doubt can be put in reverse form, for my purposes, because I'm doubtful of a knowledge, at least at times: I am unable to agree with others and so I wonder on what basis I have to think that this is a knowledge I possess at all? What could change my mind on the matter to conform with others? Perhaps this is also why I see it as faith -- it seems like I'm the odd man out, and yet I cannot change my belief in spite of this.
Now sometimes I have changed my mind. The question of violence is one I tend to go back and forth on, but the at-bottom sentiment is what drives me to think "No, it's pretty much wrong". One thing that moral realism explains is that people do, at times, change from one perspective to another because they think it's true. In fact I'd say this is why, early on, I had realist inclinations because I've changed over time in the same way I've changed my beliefs about facts in the world. It seemed to me that because I had changed my mind on this or that moral position that there must be some truth to the matter. But I notice many prefer to stay where they are -- so it does really seem to come to seem less like a knowledge than I had previously thought. I'm still open to looking at various articulations, but most of the time I see people setting up camps rather than exploring the various ways of thinking through the ethical.
Or, at least, the desire is to find a way to express ethics in a way that it's not just "Well, not enough people agree with me, so it probably isn't true" -- because that seems to be where we're at on some issues.
But I must admit that these desires and doubts are not arguments. The argument for me, more than the Guillotine (because I think sentiment is perfectly compatible with rationality, and there could be interesting ways of working sentiment into logical form) is from difference, in the form "If morals were real then we would agree to such and such a standard. We do not agree to that standard, therefore morals are not real" -- but I can see it needs delimiting from the way this expresses, and some of my doubt is based in an inability to articulate a standard. It's too broad and gives the impression that I'm arguing that morals are necessarily not real, where the actual doubt is: here are some issues where reasoning seems to stop working, and so I have some doubts about whether truth is part of our discussion here or whether this is a body of knowledge or whether it's an art, and how to go about thinking here.
No problem! Thank you for bringing thought-provoking material to the discussion board!
I would say that my mistake was in not realizing that a subject-referencing normative fact would obligate the subject, without need of another prescription for justification, because if 'one ought to...' is a fact then it is true and if it is true that 'one ought to' then one ought to (as a mere tautology).
So, afterall, the disagreement between me and (possibly) Banno is that (1) I don't think there exists any such subject-referencing normative facts and (2) it is not enough for a normative statement to be factual in order for moral facts to exist (since if the normative fact isn't subject-referencing, then granting it as true doesn't entail that one ought to do anything). I think @Banno would disagree with both 1 and 2.
To your point, I just don't see how it is valid separate quantifying over statements completely from states of affairs: to me, a proposition is a statement that corresonds to a state-of-affairs. So even quantifying over a statement is a proposition (which references a statement) that is true IFF it corresponds to that state-of-affairs (i.e., that there really is that statement).
Not a problem at all! Admittedly, I haven’t read most of your posts, but assuming it is about this topic (metaethics) then I don’t mind at all. I usually only read the one’s that link me in it some way or another (e.g., quote or @).
As a moral subjectivist, my push-back would be that moral nihilism entails that there are no true moral statements. Moral subjectivism (arguably) saves moral anti-realism from complete intelligibility and allows anti-realists to still validly have moral discourse: I don’t see how that is the case with moral non-cognitvists and nihilists. If you think all moral judgments are false, then there is nothing to be said about morality.
This is a common and misplaced objection to moral anti-realism. Firstly, even if there are moral facts, everything bottoms out at violence—period—since values are what drive societies, not morals. One has to value moral facts to even impose them in the first place, and that bottoms out equally at violence.
Likewise, moral anti-realist positions like moral subjectivism can allow for rational and productive moral discourse—so it certainly is not the case that it necessarily explodes into violence.
That’s true. Banno can justify what they ought to do if ‘they ought to...’ is a moral fact, but there are still value judgments underpinning Banno’s actions here—there’s no way around that. However, this was not my intention with Hume’s Guillotine, and I think my original argument is false.
I am now at a similar point: I just don’t believe there are any subject-referencing normative facts. I’ve looked into moral naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of objective morality and I don’t buy it. So I don’t really have an argument anymore, or if I do then it is just “I don’t buy it, convince me”.
Are you saying that we do not know that there are moral facts or are you saying that we do not know whether or not something like "you ought not harm another" is a moral fact? Because these are different things (e.g., I know that you have/had a mother but I do not know which woman is/was your mother).
I will entertain either of those. Preferably, I would like to hear (1) how we know there are moral facts, (2) where and what they subist/exist in or of, and (3) how we discover them. I think those are the key points I would question.
Quoting Bob Ross
Moral cognitivism: Ethical statements may have a truth value. They may be true, they may be false. Moral cognitivism does not rule out assigning some third or even no, truth value to some Ethical statements. Hence a moral cognitivist may adopt, say, Kripke's theory of truth and assign no truth value to some ethical statements. Such a one would be a non-cognitive antirealist. But keep in mind that this term only has standing in contrast to moral non-cognitivism; we would not use "non-cognitivism" if it were not for "cognitivism"
Moral realism is sometimes understood as claiming that moral statements have the same sort of standing as other statements about how things are; a cognate of moral objectivism. It is also sometimes understood as asserting that moral statements are all either true or they are false, a notion which is very nearly the same. Again, moral realism is set up as against moral antirealism; we would not use "realism" if it were not for "antirealism"
If there is a point to be made about "-ism"s, it is that no such nomenclature can ever be finalised, nor even agreed on. The mere act of setting out a nomenclature invites folk to contradict it or invent novelties that do not fit in. Arguing in terms of "-ism"s is fraught with ambiguity. Best avoided.
But honour is due to you for reconsidering your position.
I guess the only issue I face while interpreting your view (thus far) is that I am a moral cognitivist and a moral anti-realist. So, I guess, under your terms I am a moral realist but not in the sense that I believe there are moral facts, right?
Or do you think that accepting moral cognitivism entails accepting moral facticity?
it's all in the detail.
The time honored perspective is that we know there are moral facts because of God, and they exist in God's nature, and we discover them in the Bible. I don't think there is any other commonly accepted framework for moral facts. I think that rejecting the above is to reject moral facts.
But this is different from
Quoting Banno
Which puts volition and action at the center, rather than the propositions in a book.
I didn't make this connection, though I ought to have before -- but a reread of Fear and Trembling might be due.
I think you and Banno are agreeing that there are no moral facts. I love Fear and Trembling, btw.
Which ones, what mind-independent feature, and how could that come to our sensibility if not through phenomenal interpretation (i.e not a fact about anything but perception in an individual)?
This isn't really aimed at you - i just saw this comment and have never heard anything come close to justifying it.
Perhaps “one ought not harm another.”
Quoting AmadeusD
Perhaps that one ought not harm another.
Quoting AmadeusD
Perhaps not all truths come to our sensibility through phenomenal interpretation.
For example, perhaps either it is a mind independent fact that the universe was created by a transcendent intelligent designer or it is a mind independent fact that the universe wasn’t created by a transcendent intelligent designer. Perhaps either it is true that it is sometimes reasonable to believe in something despite there being no phenomenal evidence or it is true that it is never reasonable to believe in something despite there being no phenomenal evidence.
Or must we be agnostic on all such things? But then what phenomenal evidence suggests that we must be agnostic on all such things?
Oh. Well, now I see it.
Read this morning. It's definitely more soothing than the Dane's :D
It seems right, though.
Weren't you agreeing that morality doesn't tell us anything about the way the world is? That's what Banno had said in the quote you posted. A fact is an aspect of the way the world is.
Tolstoy was a giant Schopenhauer fan. He's awesome.
Whereas before I think I've been treating these as lumped together in thinking through intractable problems in ethics, and wondering, in that ambiguity, if this is more a matter of faith than reason, or at least a kind of faith within the bounds of reason.
We might say that the hermit on the mountain tells the emporer a truth about the world at the end of the story of the [s]Doestevsky's[/s][s]Dostoevsky's[/s]Tolstoy's three questions even though it does not rely upon facts. There's a sense in which the story gives credence to the notion through on over-arching providence, but I think that's understandable in the context of a story trying to deal with what seem like reasonable questions that don't have specific, factual answers.
Why can't this be a feature of the world?
I recently finished reading some Kripke and he used "fact" to refer to some detectable feature of the world. Sentences and utterances are definitely detectable. That someone assigned the property of truth to an uttered sentence is detectable. What does that mean, though? Is there supposed to be come correspondence between the so called true statement and the world? Or does truth just have a social function, as a deflationist might say?
At this point there's just going to be a rift between deflationists and truth realists. One doesn't have any force over the other. It just comes down to how far out on a limb of realism one wants to go, you know what I mean? It's along the lines of a matter of taste.
The closest to "can't" might be the argument from queerness, but I have to admit that I think that argument only follows with a greater degree of certainty about how the world is. Or, also, one might contend that "truths", in the above sense as distinct from facts, are queer, and so the argument is overcome.
Why can't "you ought not harm another" set out how the world is? I guess I'm just not really sure what you mean by "how the world is"?
1. The baby exists
2. The baby is crying
3. The baby was born in October
4. The baby will be going to see the doctor tomorrow
5. The baby wouldn't have been born had her parents never met
6. You ought not eat the baby
7. 1 + 1 = 2
Which are truths? Which are facts? Is there a relevant difference between being a truth and being a fact? Does it matter if something is a fact but not a truth or a truth but not a fact?
Surely all that matters is whether or not the baby is crying, whether or not you ought not eat the baby, whether or not 1 + 1 = 2, etc.? Forget the terms "truth" and "fact" if they're causing you so much trouble.
I don't understand this to be a 'feature' of anything, but a subjective judgement. I'm wanting to know what is at the bedrock of that claim, to support it, in objective terms?
Quoting Michael
I very much agree with this, though im somewhat murky on how that's the case - It seems unavoidable, despite not really groking a mechanism by which is could 'come to our attention' as opposed to assuming some innate knowledge of certain 'facts'.
I'm fine with the concept of a sort of epigenetic predisposition to certain behaviours because they are conducive to survival, let's say (though, that discussion could get very complicated in it's own right) but i can't understand that they could be 'information' or 'truth' in the sense that it's independent of the subject.
There seems to be this assumption that it can be an objective brute fact that gravity exists, that pi is irrational, and that I would never have been born had one of my parents died in their childhood, but that it cannot be an objective brute fact that one ought not harm another. Why is that?
E.g Gravity exists as a brute fact - but we can't explain what it is. But we know it's there, having it's effect, whatever it may be. So i think that's a bad example because i would just agree its only objective in the most general possible sense (and, tied directly with language).
That Pi is irrational is actually subjective, in the sense that the criteria for a number being irrational (no a/b integer status) is just something we've decided to use that term 'irrational' for. But it is objective, in the sense that, it is - given that artificial definition - inarguably and necessarily in that category.
But i see your discomfort, and i outlined a similar feeling in another thread (or maybe it was earlier here? I forget). Discussion artificially 'true' statements can't be considered objective because without hte subject, the criteria being met vanishes.
With an ought-statement, however, we use it in the reverse: We want the states of affairs to fit with our words rather than our words to set out states of affairs. So "You ought not eat the baby" is about what you ought-not do rather than what you are doing: One describes, the other proscribes, and this difference in use seems to cause some problems in thinking through ethics.
We can call it a fact, being this is a free world and we're setting out how it's best to talk, but the ethical differences seem to remain.
I'd say that it means the speaker believes it ought to be true, in the case of moral propositions. So "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is true means that I believe one ought not kick puppies for fun.
But in terms of the metaphysics of morals... well, yeah, there'd be some disagreements there. And we could appeal to taste in making a case for one or another metaphysic. Though that doesn't preclude a kind of real ethic in the sense that actions are real, and metaphysics can be seen as kind of literature rather than our real actions, that it is about our actions, and so taste comes about because we're evaluating literature rather than actions, and in the case of action we might make the case that there's more to it than taste, that goodness -- and not just beauty -- is important too.
And why can’t it be that one such state of affairs is that we ought not harm another?
You can, it's just not persuasive to the person who believes we ought to harm another, so our differences remain even as you call it a state of affairs.
The same might also be true of obligation. Given the artificial definition of the words “you”, “ought”, “not”, “harm”, and “another” it is necessarily the case that you ought not harm another.
It is one state of affairs among many. Now what?
Whether or not it’s persuasive is a separate matter. Flat Earthers often aren’t persuaded.
I’m only trying to explain moral realism, not argue that it’s correct. Moral realists might claim that a moral statement like “you ought not murder” is true because that you ought not murder is a brute, mind-independent state of affairs.
As for how to justify such a claim, they might accept that there is no empirical evidence, but argue that not all justifications are empirical. Certain rational truths simply have no empirical evidence.
I’m not sure what you mean. Yes, there are many states of affairs: one ought not murder, my name is Michael, it will rain over my house tomorrow, etc.
How do moral realists resolve descriptive moral relativism?
How do moral realists explain that different people have different ideas about what is right or wrong?
How do moral realists explain that some people believe that murder is wrong, but some other people believe that murder is not wrong?
Well, why not. There's more than one way to use the word, sometimes folk use it to refer to any truth, sometimes, and especially sometimes when doing philosophy, only to those truths that have a direction of fit of word-to-world; the speaker is attempting to match there words to the way things are.
Having two differing senses is fine, provided they are used consistently.
What would be an error, and I think we can see this in the OP, would be to mix the two uses and think one had found an argument. To say that "facts" are only sentences about the material world, and that only facts are true, and therefore only sentences about the material world are true.
I don’t understand the relevance of your questions. People can believe different things about maths and physics and so on, but there are nonetheless right and wrong answers. So too with ethics.
How does a moral realist know something is false? Because their "gut feeling" tells them so?
There seems to be an advantage in keeping our ought statements small. Burying children under buildings is wrong, even if it helps one meet the Grand Strategy.
Realists will disagree. That I ought not harm another is as much a state of affairs as that 1+1=2 and that electrons are negatively charged particles and that it will rain over my house tomorrow.
Possibly.
Do you claim that it is unreasonable to claim to know that something is false because their “gut feeling” tells them so? If you do, how do you know this? Is that your “gut feeling”?
He wrote one as well? I'll have to look for it...
:wink:
Do we have to choose? Why not both, or either depending on what you are doing?
This sounds a little JPB :P
Truth being functional, to my mind, removes all real meaning from the word. Then again, 'my truth' tends to be an accepted social norm these days. I just think that's bogus.
A judgement, perhaps, but why "subjective"? What does that word add?
How so? What does “state of affairs” mean to you?
Quoting AmadeusD
That one ought not harm another is the mind-independent state of affairs.
To me, a state of affairs is an actual, obtaining situation in the world independent of further judgement. Something like "There are others" could be a state of affairs. "Others suffer if we harm them" could be another state of affairs. "We should not harm others" is clearly, not a state of affairs, but a proclamation derived from a set of states of affairs interpreted in certain ways.
Quoting Michael
Per the above, I quite disagree and would just say you haven't presented a sufficient basis for this being a necessary element of the world.
Sure. I don't think that flexibility gets us any closer to an argument for moral realism, though.
Too strong. It's not that the believing makes it so. If it's true, it's true regardless of the belief.
In trying to relate the logical, propositional view with a psychological perspective, I start from the thought that ‘ought’ and ‘should’ arise where there is an indeterminate situation, with at least two outcomes being possible. In science, when we say a certain outcome ought to ensue, we mean that it is statistically likely given our knowledge of the facts involved. When we say a moral outcome ought to ensue, we dont mean one outcome is more likely than the alternatives, but that we prefer one outcome over the others. Where things get tricky from a psychological perspective is when we compare the grounds for our moral preference with the grounds for considering one empirical outcome more likely than another. Even if we believe that moral preferences can be justified on the basis of something more than whim, the social realities we might argue bind our moral preferences ( people shouldn’t happily torture dogs) would seem to be a different category than the empirical realities binding our scientific oughts. But is this distinction justified? If we say the direction of fit for empirical oughts is from the word to the world, aren’t we forgetting that the world we are relying on is already defined on the basis of the social reality of a discursive paradigmatic scheme? So it seems in both the case of the empirical ‘is’ and the moral ‘ought’ , we are relying on a grounding in a social reality that is itself the product of a pragmatic, contingent coordination of values.
Well, the claim that London is in England could not be made without a subject to make the claim. Is it subjective, too?
You will have real trouble attempting to show a distinct division between subjective and objective statements. Folk assume the distinction is clear. It isn't.
Deflationists agree.
And the moral realist will claim that that one ought not harm another is an actual, obtaining situation in the world independent of further judgement.
Good for them.
They say the same thing about realists. I mentioned this earlier. It's a matter of taste.
Yes. Because guts aren't reasonable.
Moral realism is actually metaethical authoritarianism/egoism.
Issues of morality are inevitably about how people treat eachother. If one person says, "This is the truth and all else is wrong" and then punishes everyone who thinks otherwise, then that's simply authoritarianism.
How do you know this?
For realists, "perspective" only exists to mean 'not knowing the truth, but merely having a perspective'.
If realists would acknowledge perspectivism as valid, they would cease being realists.
It's my gut feeling against theirs.
Those are subjective terms for subjective demarcations within actual states of affairs (that there is land encompassing what is called England and subsequently London. Your statement is only 'true' in light of the subjective perception of the piece of land in question as liable to come under those labels. It doesn't, to my mind, even lend itself to an argument that it is objective - though, i have covered why i think this earlier. It's an artificial construction that can't be defeated based on arbitrary axioms (England exists within certain borders; London subsequently the same within England)
Precisely. You have a gut feeling that moral realism is false. They have a gut feeling that moral realism is true. One of you is right and one of you is wrong. Neither has empirical or self-evident rational justification.
But there is an objective, mind-independent, non-physical fact-of-the-matter (either moral realism is correct or it isn't). So at the very least moral realism isn't inherently incoherent in arguing that there are objective, mind-independent, moral facts-of-the-matter.
What do you mean by "supernatural"? Do you mean "non-physical"? Well, yes. Moral realists don't usually claim that moral facts are physical facts. Just as mathematical realists don't usually claim that mathematical facts are physical facts.
"London" is a subjective term?
Sure, the boundary of the city is a convention... but that does not make it subjective.
And that's actually why I chose that example.
A realist can't make a claim that a judgement is objective, because that would entail they were not realists with regarding to 'actual objects' and merely assert their existence based on perception.
Though, that particular trouble might boil down to what I accept to be true in another comment of yours - that it may be merely intuition vs intuition.
If you accept moral realism, it's not because of any argument. It's just built in to your assumptions about the world. There is no good argument for moral realism. That there are moral truths does not show moral realism. How many more words are necessary? :confused:
I did cover this elsewhere though - I'm willing to grant 'objective' status to things that inarguably conform to abitrary criteria. But London doesn't exist, at all, let alone within certain boundaries, without subjects to accept, based on literally nothing at bed-rock, that it's true. So, in that sense sure, it can be considered objective - with reference to subjective criteria.
No. My gut feeling is that there might be a misnaming going on.
I suspect that some people merely pose as moral realists because it is often advantageous to do so.
I'm not sure about this. I revise my earlier statement that it's my gut feeling against theirs. I actually allow for the possibility that they might have a knowledge I don't have.
How do you know this?
I actually rephrased my claim to say "there is an objective, mind-independent, non-physical fact-of-the-matter."
Oh. Well... I think I understand the explanation of moral realism you've supplied. I can understand that it can be defended, which is why I noted I'm not going for necessity. That's too high a bar, and it's not even interesting to the problem that I see because maybe we could, at some point, find agreement on intractable questions in which case my entire argument would evaporate.
It's subjective in the sense that it's people who are talking about its existence.
Objectivists and moral realists talk as if it's not they, persons, who talk, but that when they open their mouths, The Absolute, Objective Truth comes out.
Folk hereabouts seem to confuse "subjective" and "conventional".
In fact, "having reasons of justifications for accepting moral realism" would undermine the whole project.
But I think it's possible to pose as a moral realist. Perhaps most people who appear to be moral realists are in fact posing as such.
Quoting Banno
The first answer:
Quoting AmadeusD
London does't work.
Let's try "The table is made of wood". It strikes me that the claim "The table is made of wood" could not be made, but for a subject perceiving it's value.
So is "The table is made of wood" subjective?
That's interesting.
I'm with you that we rely upon the social, and that we're embedded in a world with others. But is the social a product, when considered ethically? I think a product is a relation between entities and how they interact, a kind of description of process from one entity to another. Descriptively our empirical "is" and our moral "ought" come from the same space -- and this would be true if we emphasize the social in our description of a psychology or some kind of description of its structure -- but does this explain why we differ in our judgments on particular ethical problems that seem intractable and without answer? Is it simply that we are part of a different tribe which presently enacting values at odds?
That would seem to follow along with there not exactly being an answer here as much as a preference, no? It's like the values we're coordinating with others are the basis upon which we can make a distinction between empirical 'is' and moral 'ought', but does that recognition give us an entry into understanding a path out of seemingly intractable ethical problems?
In this second case, I would say yes. 'wood' is merely a symbol for a state of affairs (that being liganous plant matter existing). The table part, could certainly be considered subjective - but that's a known issue (what makes a table, such as it is?). So, the statement (taking the identity of a table for granted) is objectively true.
But i say that London is not in the same category as Wood. 'London' doesn't represent the 'state of affairs' of 'land on the Earth'. It represents teh subjective demarcation of certain of that land, as liable to come under the label London due only to custom.
Palestine comes to mind as a better example ;)
London exists as an abstract concept applied by custom to a plot of land. For someone to know London is where it is (by custom) they have to have that explained. Geopolitically, its objectively real.
But geopolitics are just persistent opinions of the majority.
You are saying "yes", it is subjective, then concluding that it is objectively true? I don't follow this at all.
Quoting AmadeusD
But isn't the table also a subjective demarcation?
Wood exists as an abstract concept applied by custom to certain materials. Chemistry is just persistent opinions of the majority.
So again, what does "subjective" add to "I don't understand this to be a 'feature' of anything, but a subjective judgement"?
I agree that semantics are not that important; but when discussing metaethics, isn't it at least useful to use the standard terminology?
Often the conversation degenerates into arguments about the "true" nature of this or that "ism". Better to keep to the basics. So in this thread, the interesting bit is not who is or is not an antirealist, but whether there are moral truths.
Sorry, hasty response there. Objectively true. I thought i had delineated between 'table' which would be subjective in some sense, with 'table made of wood'. If we accept a table as-is, then the statement is objectively true. Sorry for the confusion.
Quoting Banno
Yes. I went over this in that same passage, but i understand the confusion given the above.
Quoting AmadeusD
I agree that 'table' is a subjective demarcation of an object (wood, or the tree from which that wood came). But the statement "The table is made of wood", accepting of what a table actually is, can be considered objectively true. It's not a perception that it's made of wood - it's a perception that it's a table. I had entered that claim on the premise that we're not questioning what a table is. If we're still questioning what a table actually is, then it's still subjective. I just purposefully removed that to get at the heart of the question (to my mind) whicih was the difference between 'wood' and 'London'. London is analogous to table. Both merely custom in practice. Wood is what it is - and that can be boiled down to atoms, quarks etc... But the high-level organisation of those things into a ligand-heavy plant matter is wood.
Quoting Banno
I guess having reference to the above, i would just repeat my answer with the addition of 'judgement' being ipso facto subjective - apologies for being imprecise. The word 'subjective' itself, adds nothing, but highlights that aspect of a judgement. So I'd probably roll back a claim that using that word has much value.
Let me give you my concerns with this kind of Abrahamic-Theistic moral realist view and let me know what you think.
Firstly, if the moral facts are in and of God’s nature, then God didn’t create them. If God didn’t create them, then there is something which is greater than God—which defies the standard Leibnizian definition of God being that which there is no greater being. Perhaps, to be fair, by “no greater being”, we are strictly talking about persons—but then, even in the case Christianity (and the like) are false then the greatest person is now (by definition) God. Irregardless, it seems (to me) to undermine God’s existence.
Secondly, if the moral facts are in and of God’s nature, then that warrants a (conceptual) exposition of (1) how they exist and (2) what they exactly are. To say “the moral facts are derived from God’s nature” just doesn’t cut it for me: how do I know those normative facts are morally signified? Is there a normative fact that one can derive subject-referencing norms from God’s nature? It seems, when one is faced with actually giving an explanation (of those moral facts in God’s nature), that they warrant an existence of their own...such as Platonic Forms.
Thirdly, I don’t believe that the Bible, if granted as true, gives us any insight into how those alleged ‘moral’ facts that exist in God’s nature: it just describes various derived ‘moral’ facts which are predicated with “God’s nature is such that He is omnibenevolent”.
Interesting. Honestly, I find ethical intuitionism much more plausible than the Biblical moral realist account.
Why is London analogous to table, but wood isn't? London is also what it is - and that can also be boiled down to atoms, quarks etc... And the high-level organisation of those things is London.
Just repeating, my purpose here is to put the doubt to there being a decisive separation between "objective" and "subjective".
And the reason for doing so is to show that the difference between scientific and ethical statements is not that the one is objective, the other subjective.
it's about what one is doing with each - direction of fit.
Why ought we do as god says?
One cannot avoid having to make choices.
If, theoretically, there were facts embedded into God's will such that "one ought not torture puppies for fun", then it would be a moral fact and meet your criteria (as a moral realist)(I think) as well...but I just don't see how that actually is the case. Appealing to God just seems like opening up a vacuous concept where one can just throw in "all-good-willed" to justify 'moral facticity', but what makes God all good willed? Some platonic forms?
Quoting Bob Ross
This is where I disagree with Abraham. I don't see that "god wills it" is the same as "It is good" or "one ought do it".
:up:
So, for your view, how do we discover the moral facts? I understand you are a moral cognitivist...but how do we evaluate which moral propositions are actually true? Are moral properties reducible to natural properties in your view? Are they platonic forms? Something else?
That presumes a word-to-world direction of fit.
Perhaps i'm not seeing what you are.. But this seems a bit askance from what i said
London is a piece of naming, not a piece of land. As is table viz. Table is what we call certain bits of wood, used via custom for certain purposes. While there isn't an exact analogy, London is what we call a certain bit of land which, via custom for certain purposes, has been called London.
It's not an exact analogy, granted, but I can't see any connection at all between London and wood as opposed to London and table. The '..is in England' bit just runs into the same problem of England being merely a name for a certain bit of a land which, by custom, we've agreed to call England - within which sits a smaller plot of land *insert above take on London here*. Is that a bit clearer?Quoting Banno
I assume on this front you accept there are no 'facts of the matter' beyond impression?
Is there an argument for the bolded part? It sounds like you're saying that part of God is greater than God. That doesn't make much sense.
Quoting Bob Ross
The idea is that moral facts exist as an aspect of God. This isn't an argument, by the way. It's a worldview. God is a hinge proposition. If you reject it, you reject moral realism.
Quoting Bob Ross
Christianity uses the Bible as a touchstone. It's a living religion, so it doesn't reduce to scripture. It's made of history, the human psyche, and the lives of millions of people for the last 1800 years.
Quoting Bob Ross
Are you saying that ethical intuitionism is moral realism?
I think it goes further. It's subjective in the sense that it is an artificial label upon something that has no conformity to the label other than in the mind of a subject who has accepted the command to apply the label to that plot of land.
What do you mean? I feel like you just sidestepped the questions I asked. It still stands: how do we "discover", "figure out", "decipher", etc. which moral propositions are true (under your view)?
Not an argument per se, but here’s my reasoning. Let’s do it by analogy.
The feeling of hunger is a biological manifestation of my obligation (biologically) to eat food. This obligation exists within my body independently of my desires (as a subject: a mind): I cannot will that feeling of hunger away. This obligation would be ‘greater’, more fundamental ontologically, than me (as a subject): it governs me, not the other way around.
So it is with God and morality if the moral facts are ingrained in God’s nature: God doesn’t choose them, create them, and they dictate him—not the other way around. No matter what God thinks (assuming God could make an error for the sake of making this point), it is wrong to torture babies for fun because it is objectively wrong—and it just so happens that God’s nature is constrained by the moral facts in a way that he wills only what it good. The moral facts would be more fundamentally ontologically than God, because they dictate and govern God, not vice-versa.
This is the problem for me: it does not help me when the answer to my questions I gave are roughly “moral facts just exist as an aspect of God”. This is the typical response I get, and it answers none of my questions. I am questioning whether they are moral facts (as opposed to merely normative facts), whether they are binding for us (or do they just reference God), and how they exist in God’s nature (e.g., are they ‘biological’?)
Saying ‘it just is in God’s Nature’ just restates what I was questioning in the first place.
My point is that no where does the Bible actually explain how moral facts exist in God’s nature nor that which one’s do nor their nature.
No. Ethical intuitionism is a form of moral realism, just like your theological view. They both affirm the existence of moral facts, and I was just saying that I find it more plausible than theological views that ground the moral facts in God (whether that be His nature or His will—or both).
Perhaps you believe that only theism has the right metaphysical view to allow for moral facts, but I don’t see why that would be the case at all. An obvious contender is platonism and neo-platonist views (like atheistic platonism).
I'm a moral nihilist. I think moral realism is an aspect of our cultural heritage, specifically religion.
Oh I see...just playing devil's advocate, eh? What did you think of my responses?
I wasn't playing devil's advocate. I was just saying that religion is the only legit moral realism. I think what you're saying is that religion doesn't provide for moral realism either. My point was that it does if it's your worldview.
For example, say we discover that Neanderthals did a fair amount of cannibalism (which they did). A moral realist will say this was immoral and our cousins should be condemned. Damn the Neanderthals for eating babies. It's in the nature of the universe that it was wrong and they should have known better. In fact, they would have known better if they had accepted Jesus as their lord and savior.
A moral anti-realist says Neanderthals aren't evil. Let's see if we can understand why they became cannibals. Was it climate change? Was it encroachment by those Homo Sapiens? What happened? And this is the grand payoff for moral anti-realism. It gives you space to understand. Moral realism gives you no such space. Understanding is the beginning of mercy and compassion, both of which are anathema to moral realism.
Just to be sure, the concern here is not "table", the type, but "That table", with the definite pronoun. It's an individual table.
What I want to show is that the conventional nature of much of our language is much broader than might casually be thought. In our example, you are supposing that "London" refers only by some convention, and so is subjective; but that "that table" has something that makes it objective. My strategy is to take each definition you give of the difference between the two, and swap tham to show that the difference does not hold.
So here you claim that "'London' is what we call a certain bit of land which, via custom for certain purposes, has been called 'London'". and I'll reply "'That table' is what we call a certain bit of the room, which, via custom for certain purposes, has been called 'that table'".
And again I will suggest that these are issues of convention, which have broad agreement across speakers of English, and so are not, as you suggested, subjective.
and again, the point here is to have you question whether the distinction between "subjective" and "objective" works in the way you suppose; providing a clear segregation of the ethical from the physical.
And again, the alternative on offer is the notion of direction of fit.
______________
Quoting AmadeusD
If you flick back through my comments in this thread, I hope it will be clear that I've argued for there being true "ought" statements, and that I would count these as "facts of the matter".
So what is there that is the opposite of "subjective", if we take this as a definition? What could be objective? Because there is nothing we could list here that is not by the very fact that we list it being talked about by people. And that would make everything subjective.
Can you give a better explanation of the distinction between subjective and objective?
I don't understand how that description provides an escape from being subjective? Wide-spread acceptance of a custom doesn't make it an objective fact about the state of affairs underlying it, does it?
Or would this end up coming under the rubric I tacitly accepted, that if you're referencing 'objective' within a framework viz. 'given the custom' outline, calling the 'correct' piece of land London is then objectively true?
Quoting Banno
I don't understand how thats analogous. London is consists in a piece of land. A table consists in a piece of wood (if it's wooden, lol). You can't have a wooden table made of glass.
Quoting Bob Ross
Ok. Have you been following the discussion here about direction of fit? If not, have a read of .
To "discover" something, it has to already be there to be uncovered. So the direction of fit for making a discovery is that one produces sentences that set out what it is that has been discovered.
But this is not what we do when we talk of ethics. We reverse the process, setting out how the world ought to be, then hopefully implementing our words.
You asked:
Quoting Bob Ross
We don't discover them.
Quoting Bob Ross
There can be no algorithmic process here, that sets out which moral propositions are true and which are not.
I genuinely cannot understand how you've concluded this.
I have, more than once, outlined the problem of a 'table' being an objective demarcation - and artificially took it for granted to make my point of distinction. It is a problem, but it's a problem at a higher level than the one we're dealing with.
Assuming we don't question the identity of a table, it being wood is objective. But i have elsewhere outright owned that if we don't make that assumption, it's a subjective statement. I just removed that grey area for discussion purposes.
I don't want moral statements to "escape from being subjective", any more than I want them to escape from being green. I'm saying that the framing of the issue in terms of "objective" and "subjective" is misleading.
I was unable to follow you here. That we happen to use the phrase "that table" for that table is a question of convention, nothing to do with subjective or objective truth.
Let's reset that discussion. I have taken you to be arguing that the distinction between ethical and physical sentences is that ethical sentences are subjective and moral sentences are objective. I've been following up on that by trying to have you give a clear account of the difference between "subjective" and "objective". Your first try had "London is in England" as being subjective, while I argued that it's not subjective but conventional, and that hence you had not provided an adequate account of "subjective".
Ok. What is it that makes "This table is made of wood" an objective sentence?
Not the case. I don't subscribe to any objective morals or ethics, currently. However, I am green to this type of 'proper' argumentation so please feel free where i made have made either technical or terminological mistakes that lead you to that conclusion..
Quoting Banno
My intention was never to give a distinct account of subjective vs objective, but to lay out why a custom is not objective unless you insert the condition that it's objective because of the custom and not because of any mind-independent state of affairs. To this end, i don't think i've at all missed the mark - but i take and accept your point here in that it's a pretty imprecise discussion of subjective vs objective. I was attempting discount the objective, not place it squarely within the subjective. Though, that does seem to necesasrily follow.
Quoting Banno It isn't one, unless you accept that the object is actually a table. But both the object being a table, and being made of wood are liable to this discussion. I concede the 'table' element is not at all objective unless referring to custom (as noted above wrt London).
Edit: Sorry, to make this clearer - I am taking as inarguable that London, whether it is objectively London, is actually a plot of land. Which sort of reverses the analogy you're making - The 'table' whether or not it is a table in actuality, is made of wood.
I take the 'land' and 'wood' as objective facts about the two objects, but their naming as non-necessary and a mere custom.
Oh, my bad. That should have read "physical", not "moral".
Quoting AmadeusD
I know. But I'm attempting to have you do so, so as to show that the distinction cannot be made do the work you set for it.
Quoting AmadeusD
Ok, why is "This is a table" not objective? Seems to me that its being a table is at least as clear as its being made of wood.
Thank you; good question.
To my mind, that fact of any object being 'wood' is a fact about the object's constitution, not it's identity.
The object would be 'wood' (a symbol for a mind-independent fact about the arrangement of molecules which requires no perception to be extant). A 'table' is a concept of perception, rather than discovery. We can discover 'other things' to also be wood, but we run into the same obstacle defining any object as a 'table'. 'wood', in any usage, is still wood. A table may not be, if used for a distinctly 'other' purpose (e.g as a pedastal)
I may be ignoring a botanist's objection that the definition of Wood is murky (i don't know that it is, though). I understand it to be a discovered arrangement of molecules, universally discernable. And could be wrong on that - if I am, then I concede the entire thought.
Ok, so your argument is that facts about an objects constitution are objective, but facts about an object's identity are subjective? And further we "discover" what things are constituted of, but we "perceive" their identity?
I would say this is true for objects which are customary, rather than symbolic (i.e 'table' is customary, 'tree' is symbolic)
I have not: thank you for the link!
I see. So, under your view, how do we know we are actually abiding by the moral facts then? Intuition? What vessel do we use to prescribe moral facts as opposed to non-facts?
My take on the post by @Moliere that you referenced was that the moral facts would be an ‘is’ that is an ‘ought’: they would be mind-independently existing prescriptions. It seems like you both disagree with that, and are in favor of some sort of neo-Humian Guillotine.
How are we to tell which is which, in new cases?
For example, the tree fern in the front yard... customary or symbolic? Note that it's a Dicksonia antarctica, and so not a tree; isn't not counting it as a tree a matter of convention?
Interesting, I would say various religious views contain within them moral realist positions (not in the sense that I agree with them but rather that they purport to lay claim to moral facts); but there are non-theistic views (albeit probably still religious) which equally purport such claims and (I would say) with equal (if not more) plausibility.
I disagree. Both anti-realists and realists can attempt to understand why they became cannibals, and a moral anti-realist can condemn them as evil (if they want).
Not my mind, but I recognize the difficulty in clearly delineating and may well end up conceding, so take the following as my muddling through intuition...
The symbolism "tree" or "plant" are customary as English-speakers have agreed to use them to refer, but they refer to an object, without custom, that has necessarily limited distribution. Here, an idealist would say i'm already off. But i take objects to actually exist.
A 'table' is merely a concept of mentation, attached, by custom, to objects with various and ill-defined forms and uses. The fact of their constitution (wood, glass, resin(that one's murky) etc..) aren't liable to the same murkiness and so whether we think your object is a tree or plant can be, definitively, shown to be true or false with reference to the actual circumstances of its constitution.
If there is a definition of 'fern' then using that term can be 'correct', if used in conjunction with an object which in fact, is, those things whcih constitute the meaning of fern. We could have used any other word, but it would refer to the same set of mind-independent properties contained in the currently symbol of 'fern'. Equally with tree. (again, a botanists correction notwithstanding).
Like what?
Quoting Bob Ross
Imagine there's a spectrum. On one end is the extreme moral realist view. On the other is the extreme anti-realist. Most of us swing between the two. When we want to understand the criminal, we put aside judgment in order to see the facts. When judgment is important, we become blind to circumstances that formed the sinner and we just condemn.
If you look closely at anyone who strongly believes in moral realism, you'll find a bit of a misanthropist. They're stuck on the realism side because their psyche is full of hatred and condemnation. The compulsion to condemn is so strong that they can't tolerate any notion of relativity. Or so it seems to me. :razz:
Ethical intuitionism & neo-platonism.
Interesting. I could see saying moral realists tend to be quicker to judge, but I think this may becoming a bit of an ad hominem on moral realists out there...
Fwiw, i felt the same - though, the underlying idea is probably close to my experience.
Moliere's exposition of directional fitness has got me thinking. Perhaps there is an argument to be formulated in favor of moral anti-realism (or a hybrid kind of view) here:
P1: How the world is does not entail how the world should be.
P2: States-of-affairs are about how the world is.
P3: Normative judgments are about how the world should be.
P4: Moral judgments are normative judgments.
C1: Therefore, states-of-affairs do not entail any moral judgments.
P5: Moral facts are states-of-affairs.
P6: States-of-affairs do not entail any moral judgments [C1].
C2: Therefore, moral facts do not entail any moral judgments.
I think, Banno, you will have to reject P5. But if this argument holds, then we get a weird severing between the moral facts and the moral judgments we make, such that we cannot infer how to morally judge from whatever moral facts are presented to us. Let me know what you think.
Arent facts derived from states of affairs, rather than consist in them?
How would an ethical intuitionist say moral truths exist? I'm somewhat familiar with Neoplatonism. Christianity absorbed it.
One has to come to terms with how different, and how similar, moral statements are from physical statements.
Analytic considerations, as I hope is clear from my part in this discussion, are not about what one ought to do in particular cases, but about the plumbing behind such considerations. we've I hope made some progress, in working out that there can be moral truths, and that one way to differentiate ethical statements is by their direction of fit.
It would be a surprise if analytic considerations, or philosophical considerations generally, could tell us which statements about the physical world are true and which false. To do that one has to go out and engage with the world to make observations and talk to others about their observations and so on. By having a conversation. It's also a commonplace in the sciences to suppose that the statements we say are "true" are true only tentatively, open to revision.
We might not expect analytic considerations to tell us which ethical statements are true and which false. We might expect that we work out which ethical statements are tire and which false again by engaging with the world, talking to others, by having a conversation. But in place of the word-to-world observations, we need a world-to-word direction of fit; that is, ethics is about doing things, about actions.
Speaking roughly, perhaps we (in the plural, not "I") make ethical statements true by our enacting them. Not by making them the case, but by intending them to be the case and acting to that end. And again, what we consider to be true might well be revised on further consideration.
So if what folk are after is a list of eternal moral verities, then I can't help them. but further, such a list would be mistaking "ought" for the "is" of the list.
No grand moral programs; just a path.
For clarity, I reject the suggestion in your post.
But im very interested in what could constitute a reason to revise a moral 'fact'?
yet
Quoting AmadeusD
There's nothing here that helps us see a difference. One might as well claim:
and
Is this supposedly the justification...?
Quoting AmadeusD
The Dicksonia example shows the murkiness is right there - it's a tree but not a tree. What counts as a tree is an issue of convention.
Quoting Banno
Your response seems to boil down to this - some labels are ill-defined. If the scientific fact is that tree is ill-defined, then yes, sure. That doesn't affect my distinction. It just means the distinction can't apply here. We can change the word, but not what it refers to, in a lot of cases. Water is a great one.
I would it looks like you're trying to defeat a rule by bringing up examples to which the 'rule' just wouldn't apply. It wouldn't apply to something artificially demarcated ( the plot of land called London) named by convention (the act of calling that plot of land London). For clarity, th 'rule' i refer to is the criteria of being objective.
Something to which we refer, without any grey area (water), by convention, can be objective, despite the use of the word 'water' being arbitrary. The object is the thing 'water' refers to, without ambiguity, whether you call it fire, paper, water, hogwash, bone or anything else.
Without the convention of London as to a border within what is called England, it ceases to be, in any sense other than imagination. The piece of land exists, but the restriction of it being 'London' vanishes immediately the convention isn't in play.
The Mines of Moria do not actually exist, as written in Tolkien, but we could refer to any plot of land as 'The Mines of Moria'. Would convention somehow bring them into existence, in that case? Or would we be merely enacting a naming, without having any effect on the object?
Which is, essentially, the point i made. Name is a convention - WHAT is being named, can either be convention (London) or not (wood). If we have to conclude that the mere use of language is what sets something upon the subjective pedestal, i just can't buy into that and need to do more work to enunciate why.
I've lost you somewhere.
It's nothing to do with ill-defined definitions. It was about attempting to get a clear notion of what your word "subjective" was doing. The discussion got lost along the way.
I'll take some solace from the fact that you are talking in terms of conventions, and maybe leave it there.
That is true, P5 should have been "Moral facts are about states-of-affairs".
Ethical intuitionism is a form of moral non-naturalism, and says that we intuit the moral facts. Its main argument for moral realism is that:
1. One ought to trust their intuitions (intellectual seemings) unless there are good reasons to doubt them (phenomenal conservatism).
2. It intellectually seems as though there are moral facts and there are no good reasons to doubt those intuitions.
3. Therefore, there are moral facts.
I just disagree with the second part of #2. But this view is compatible with platonism: we intuit the moral facts which are platonic forms.
I see. The problem is that I don’t see you actually describing, even in principle, where or what the moral facts subsist in—so how do you even know they exist nor how to come to know them? Nothing you said actually explains how you can discern a moral fact from a taste. Performing an ‘ethical’ action presupposes that you know it is ethical—but I am failing to see how you would know this in your view. It seems like moral facts are sui generis under your view, perhaps like in moral non-naturalism, and I just fail to see how you would ever know them.
Simply asked, how do you discern that what you are doing is actually moral as opposed to a strongly held taste that you have?
Fair enough. Within your view, please define 'fact'. For me, it definitely is a 'statement which refers to a stance-independently existing thing'. What world-to-word fit-style definition do you have for fact?
I think with most Neoplatonism, the divine intellect (of which the human intellect is supposed to be a reflection) is associated with goodness. Evil is just separation or distance from the Nous, sinking into matter. Goodness and truth are essentially the same thing, with evil being a kind of illusion. So you're right that in Neoplatonism one intuits the Good by virtue of the intellect.
But morality is often defined as some sort of code of behavior. It's rules. The Christian take on Neoplatonism isn't about rules. It's about love. "Love and do what you will" as Augustine said.
Fair enough. Maybe we can revisit someone when I come up with a more apt way of explaining the distinction I see.
Really appreciate the exchange :cheer:
I used the term "subjective" earlier in that particular context. Like I said:
Objectivists and moral realists talk as if it's not they, persons, who talk, but that when they open their mouths, The Absolute, Objective Truth comes out.
There are people to whom sentences like this make perfect sense:
"It's important to make good decisions; this is to say, not to decide merely in favor of that which is subjective, to one's liking, but to decide in line with what is true, what is objective."
Like, IIRC, you said, people tend to think (and wrongly so) that the line between subjective and objective is sharp and easy to demarcate.
I'm not a fan of the terms "subjective" and "objective". I think they are for the most part used for purposes of judging people, and for dismissing some people.
Some pairs come to mind:
good -- bad
righteous --sinful
objective -- subjective
informed -- uninformed
etc.
Depending on one's ideology, one uses the latter word in the pair for dismissing others. When a religious person wants to dismiss someone, they do so by calling the other person "sinful". When a scientist wants to dismiss someone, they do so by calling the other person "subjective". Etc.
Well, that one's easy. Bob prefers Vanilla - that's a question of taste, and might lead to Bob only eating Vanilla ice cream. "Bob prefers Vanilla" and "Bob only eats Vanilla ice cream" are a statement of taste.
But if Bob and his army were to insist that everyone ought eat only vanilla, and that chocolate was evil and the work of the devil, that would be about morals.
Questions of taste re about what the individual should choose. Questions of morality are about what everyone should choose.
Quoting Bob Ross
Again, I'm not pretending to present you with a handbook to what you ought to do. Others canpretend to that. What we have done over the course of this thread is examine in some detail the grammar around moral language. We have found that there are moral truths, and some examples have been given by myself and others.
Not so far from here is a thread in which folk are doubting the existence of that world around them. Do you think that, though folk can doubt the chair in which they sit, that there is some ethical doctrin that will convince them all?
No.
You will have to do the work yourself.
Quoting Bob Ross
There is more than one way to use the word. I'm not too fussed which we use, provided that we keep track. The common feature is that "fact" is truth functionally equivalent to "true sentence", and this is how I mostly use the word. As has ben explained previously, problems occur when folk say "facts are only about physical things" but conclude "therefore there are no moral facts", as if this were an argument and not a tautology. The error comes to fruition when this is combined with the claim that "only facts are true" to conclude "there are no moral truths".
This question begging is the generic form of the error in your OP and a few subsequent arguments.
So we have some agreement.
Quoting baker
That's one, negative, way to view what is going on. Another more positive way is to see those claims as tentative, looking for common ground, for stuff on which we can agree.
Seems to be a difference of disposition.
But for a realist, this makes no sense. For a realist, statements with "I think ..." or "From my perspective ..." are, at best, expressions of less-than-truth. A realist will not utter them (other than, perhaps, merely by force of habit).
But i do think the force of habit is strong enough to explain why realists talk in those absolutes anyway.
Only on the assumption that everyone is equal.
In practice, there are usually multiple standards of morality. E.g. "Members of group A hold it is immoral to kill a member of group A, but not immoral to kill member of group B." "It's wrong to lie, except to outsiders."
No, the force of habit might make them say "I think", but the absolutism is central to them.
"I think xyz about, what I think, is London" is unintelligible to a realist.
Those sentences, as you posited, indicate a less-than-truth, to a realist. This is the case with that statement. Which is why it's qualified. I don't see the problem...
I do not understand realists to be unable to make equivocal or less-than-truth statements, but to delineate clearly between those whicih have truth-value and those which do not. Forgive me if im getting that wrong.
Quoting baker
You're missing the grammatical point. But then you have a particularly jaded view of humanity. Morality is irrelevant if you don't have some hope.
Agreed. But, also, there are new strands of neoplatonism, such as atheistic platonism, that get rid of the Nous. In those kinds of views, we just intuit the good, and not because it corresponds with a higher intellect.
I am not sure what you mean here. But a lot of Christian philosophers (like William lane craig) will reject platonism because the moral law is impersonal, which I don't really get the big deal with that.
But what distinguishes Bob’s taste that everyone ought to eat only vanilla from the moral fact that everyone ought to eat only vanilla?
Fair enough; but I want to clarify that I am not asking you to do that. I am asking “How do you know that any given moral judgment is factual (as opposed to being a taste: non-factual)?”. Saying that a moral fact is a true proposition doesn’t inform me how you come to know that it is true.
It would help me understand, if you could give me an example and demonstrate how you discerned that is was a fact as opposed to a taste.
This just seems like a non-sequitur: ethics doesn’t prove the existence or non-existence of non-moral entities, such as standard, ordinary objects.
Now, if you are just noting that we only gain knowledge of the moral facts through trial and error, then that’s fine...but how do you know through trial and error what is more or less a moral fact and what is an error? When we say that we gain scientific knowledge through trial and error, we still note that we are weeding out the errors by empirical tests that either verify or invalidate our hypothesis—how does your moral realism work with this regard?
A true sentence is a statement that corresponds to reality: that’s a word-to-world direction of fit, not world-to-word. I am asking you what world-to-word definition of fact, which you are deploying as a critique to P5, did you have in mind?
This has nothing to do with the word-to-world direction of fit we were talking about. My definition of a fact (i.e., a statement which corresponds to reality) is not equivalent to “facts are only about physical things”. Afterall, 1+1=2 is not about physical things, but is nevertheless a fact (by my books).
Here’s a modified version of the previous argument that takes into consideration your objections:
P1: How the world is does not entail how the world should be.
P2: Moral facts are about how the world is such that the world should be.
C: Therefore, moral facts cannot exist.
The idea is that the moral realist has to deny P1, which I find (and I think most people find) really intuitive. The only potential way out of it is to deny word-to-world direction of fit, but I as of yet to hear a fully fleshed out concept of a fact with world-to-word direction of fit. Let me know what you think.
One truth that is no fact are the logical truths, I think. There's no fact that makes "A = A" true. It's not a state of affairs, and I'm not using this "is" statement to set out how the world is as much as I'm setting out how we're going to talk about the world at all.
That is, here is a truth without a direction of fit at all, and since we have to accommodate truth to at least allow for logical truth we must accept that sometimes there are true sentences which do not set out how the world is, that are true regardless of the states of affairs.
I think this is largely in line with the analogy to mathematical reasoning for moral thinking.
Now we note that in a logic the verb is limited to "is", and it's noted that we need some kind of implicature to connect one to the other, such as "if it is raining then you ought bring an umbrella"
Consider "If you ought bring an umbrella you ought to sing a song; You ought to bring an umbrella, and therefore..." : if we render this into a sentential logic then "ought" disappears and you have modus ponens with sentences which at least appear to have a world-to-word direction of fit (since these are actually just examples in a reflection on the question, though, they do not -- that is, I think I'd tie the pragmatics to determining direction of fit)
Which is to note that we need not even derive an ought from an is or an is from an ought; that in terms of our logic or language, at least, that these are metaphysical theses. Consider the verb "to have" in relation here -- if facts are statements with a word-to-world direction of fit then "to have" is, logically speaking, a modification of the copula and fits just fine within sentential logic. So it would go with "ought" -- this is a modification of the One Big Logical Copula, you could say, which includes variations of useage between people, be it setting out a definition, setting out states of affairs, or setting out what we ought to do.
I think that this account is relying upon a deflationary view of truth, as opposed to a correspondence theory of truth, though. So it could very well be considered an anti-realism on that account, if the target is a belief in moral facts to which moral statements correspond.
Let's do that again.
It's a question of taste if it only applies to you - Bob likes vanilla.
It's a question of morality if it applies to everyone - Everyone ought like vanilla.
"Bob’s taste that everyone ought to eat only vanilla" just attempts to confuse the two. If it applies to everyone, it's a moral claim.
Quoting Bob Ross
This amounts to: what should you believe? You should work that out for yourself. Indeed, in questions of ethics, you have no choice but to work it out for yourself.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, it doesn't.
Quoting Bob Ross
Well, no. I'm just pointing out that one can't make someone believe something. there are folk here who claim to doubt the chair they sit on and the people they chat to... Mad, but that's just how it is. So I'm not going to try to convince you that kicking puppies for fun is wrong. I'll just call the RSPCA.
Incidentally, that's pretty much why I haven't participated in your other thread. Your convictions are your concern, no one else's.
Quoting Bob Ross
That just confuses direction of fit. Oh, well. I tried.
Yep.
This seems to be an implicit but quite strong admission of moral subjectivity
Quoting Banno
That seems like giving up the discussion because you hit the crux of the climb…
Can you explain your thinking?
Right. And word-to-world is what we'd need for moral realism. World-to-word moral truth would just be saying X is wrong because we say it's wrong. That's moral nihilism in a nutshell.
I disagree: logical and mathematical truths are about how we cognize, which are states-of-affairs in reality; so I reject the notion of directionless fit of facts.
I don’t see it: can you elaborate? That’s just a hypothetical imperative being used to with modus ponens to derive the consequent. Or are you saying it is world-to-word direction of fit because it is hypothetical, since it is subjective? I could get on board with that, but I don’t see how there’s such a thing as a fact which has a world-to-word direction of fit. ‘You ought to bring an umbrella’ (P2) is non-factual (to me).
This is a false dichotomy: I can have a taste such that everyone ought to like vanilla. Unless, are you agreeing that those are not exclusive options?
A taste is just a judgment which stems from someone’s psychology, such as a desire. Are you saying it is impossible for someone to desire for everyone to desire to eat vanilla?
This counts against you theory, because you are not providing any criteria to actual discern facts from non-facts, which implies to me that there is no reason to believe they are facts in the first place. I would rather default to them being purely psychological.
What would it mean for something to have a world-to-word direction of fit and be about a state-of-affairs. It seems to me that you are only a moral realist because you are a moral cognitivist.
You have no means of discerning what is a moral fact and what isn’t, and all you affirm is that there are normative propositions that are true.
I 100% agree, but @Banno thinks that moral facts do have a world-to-word direction of fit, and I am having a hard time getting them to explain (or perhaps I am just not grasping their explanation of) what that would even mean.
I guess they're saying moral ought statements are true because we say they're true.
Yep, I think that's a useful revision of the argument. :up:
What do you think about, as a moral realist, this argument:
P1: How the world is does not entail how the world should be.
P2: Moral facts are about how the world is such that it informs us how it should be.
C: Therefore, moral facts cannot exist.
Now I barely have time to respond to the discussions I am already involved in, so I don't mean to begin new ones, but in general you need to take more time in defending your premises (in prose). An argument almost always requires a defense of one's premises, even if only a sentence or two.
And a tendency to make assertions rather than give reasons.
Philosophy is hard. Much harder than most folk suppose. I can't see any further progress being made here.
Another way of saying that there are philosophically interesting ideas relating to the topic, but they are not being discussed here.
I know you said you aren't starting new conversations, but could you provide some examples (so I can research them)?
Quoting Moliere
I think it's the easy questions that are important. If you accept a moral truth then you are a moral realist, even if that truth is "easy." I don't think hard questions disprove moral realism; they only prove that there are places where moral truths come into practical conflict and create scenarios which are difficult to judge. ..But I am skating over the question of disagreement that you are thinking about.
Quoting Moliere
As I said elsewhere:
Quoting Leontiskos
Whether I look to Christ or Aristotle, I find that most people are not moral, and a fortiori, most people care nothing for moral philosophy. So I don't take the state of affairs to be as odd as you do. That said, while the conclusion of your view may not be absurd, it is quite odd. It is something like,
Now, there may be people who earnestly profess to fail to comprehend morality. But I would say that if it is observable in their actions then they understand it just fine, it's just that their theory is at odds with their actions. Interestingly, it's not clear whether Aristotle and Aquinas were "moral cognitivists," even anachronistic as the question might be. They thought that morality was more a matter of acting than thinking; that one could not usually think their way into morality or a moral life; and that theoretical moral discourse is quite limited.
(Thomas Pink has a paper on academia.edu about the force of, "Moral Obligation." This thread makes me want to read it, but it will be awhile before I have time.)
I was thinking of religious moralities, Kantian moralities, and conscience-based moralities. It seems to me that very many of these are not arguing from "how the world is," as if one could infer morality from the natural world.
Edit: Incidentally, I don't know of any knock-down treatments for moral realism. It turns out to be rather difficult to bridge the gulf between moral realism and moral anti-realism. As an example, some years ago I was engaged in a rather superficial argument with an atheist who professed that there are no moral truths. As we conversed it became very obvious that she held the prohibition on slavery as an objective moral truth, and I was able to tease this out in a dozen different ways. Nevertheless, she never admitted it, and continued to hold to her position, construing, for example, the necessary freeing of slaves as an act of violence rather than justice. As far as I'm concerned, that's a reliable interaction. Folks who profess moral anti-realism tend to be engaged in a rhetorical tack, and it is primarily their actions that betray them. For instance, creatures who don't believe in morality would never perceive injustice and never get angry. We get angry all the time. :grin:
By world, I was meaning it more generically than ‘natural world’: I meant ‘the totality of existence’. So when a religious person says, for example, ‘the moral facts come from God’s nature’, I think this falls prey to violating P1.
Interesting.
I don’t think this is the case, but I will stick to myself: I don’t mean that there are no moral facts because of a rhetorical or sophistical tack.
Also, it common in my life that moral realists think that my actions betray my words; but I think most of the time they are importing their own moral framework instead of dealing with mine on its own terms. More on that in a minute...
This is something I get from moral realists all the time: if I truly care that someone is being immoral, then I am not a moral anti-realist. But this just presupposes that if something isn’t objectively immmoral, that it doesn’t matter. Obviously, I am going to deny that. So I can get as furious as I want about people torturing babies for fun and never once concede that it is a factually wrong thing to do.
But isn't your claim tautological at that point? Obviously moral claims must be situated somewhere within "the totality of existence."
Quoting Bob Ross
No, I don't think that makes any sense. If it is not objectively wrong for others to torture babies then you should not get angry at them when they do. You get angry and intervene because you believe it is wrong for them to torture babies. Moral anti-realism is too often <affectation>.
HI mate, sorry for the delay here. Weekend with the kids :)
Quoting Banno
So, i'm taking this as an at-base position. One with which I disagree, in so far I consider truth to be corresponding to states of affairs, and I don't understand morals to be states of affairs. In that position in a baked-in need for individuals to understand their own moral compass as theirs and not aligning with some antecedent (though, i recognize that within this position is also a incredible wealth of guiding lights in previous writing and other people's conceptions of their own morals. They just are all relative to those individuals) theory that claims truth. Not an odd position, i don't think, but just laying some ground work for the response.
Quoting Banno
This seems to suppose that ethics are the correct basis/es for considering morals. I reject that wholly as ethics basically assume either 1. A worthwhile external benchmark (you could think revelation or law here); or 2. Some way to ascertain certainty around a moral claim via some ethical consideration.
If you're concluding that for ethics, individuals must 'work it out for themselves' you're (to my mind) precluding an external mitigating authority (or force) which would be required as a source of 'ethical truth' which would be required to ground a moral truth.
I certainly think you can make claims like 'Generally, suffering is bad'. That could be an ethical consideration informing a moral position to not cause suffering. However, I just don't understand how that's an objective or 'true' statement. It is patently relative. So accepting that ethics must be relative, each individual who must necessarily (by this light) work out their own ethical code as such, are being informed by a identically relative moral code as informed by that antecedent ethical consideration (notwithstanding hypocrisy lol).
If you're decoupling ethics from morals and essentially considering ethics teleological and morals some how truth-apt, I'm not really understanding how that works
I'm unsure this makes too much sense. If i'm happy with (in light of potential objections in practical day-to-day life) understanding my position is subjective, but that it is the 'best' position by my lights, given the information I believe I can rely on, how would that necessarily mean it was senseless to get angry about a behaviour that I have, by those previous subjective position/s, understood to be 'wrong'?
Making moral decisions, acting out their conclusions, and then adjusting for resulting data input seems to be a totally coherent and workable way to go about moral consideration. I suppose if you take morals to be objective (or that there are some objective morals) this might not work, but i'm more trying to make the 'other' position cohere in the face of this critique.
Because if one is going to hold others to a standard then they either have to admit that a standard exists or else accept the fact that they are performatively self-contradicting themselves. This is quite basic.
This has come up a few times.
And yet, one ought not keep slaves. It is therefore true that "One ought not keep slaves".
And hence, if truth is corresponding to states of affairs, then that one ought not keep slaves is a state of affairs.
Or there is more to truth than mere correspondence.
Quoting AmadeusD
I can't make sense of how you are distinguishing morals and ethics here. Ethics is the field of study that has as its subject, morals. What you have said is analogous to "thjis seems to suppose that botany is the correct basis for considering plants". Well, yes.
Quoting AmadeusD
You have not set out why these follow, and indeed, there are ethical proposals that do not propose an external benchmark (subjectivism) nor ethical certainty (nihilism).
Quoting AmadeusD
Here again is the ubiquitous confusion of belief and truth. Here's another analogy. The Earth is not flat. It is true that the Earth is not flat. Even given that truth, each individual can choose whether to believe that the Earth is flat, or not. They must work it out for themselves.
The exact same applies to ethical truths. Folk choose to believe, or not. They must work it out for themselves. Their believe does not determine the truth of the proposal.
Notice that you do understand that ethical truths "ground" moral truths, something you seem to deny, above.
Quoting AmadeusD
Have a read of @Leontiskos posts, above. They offer some novel contraries to this proposal.
In addition, there is a confusion here about "subjective" statements, such that you seem to suppose that hey cannot be true. That would be very odd. But then, the subjective/objective distinction is fraught with conceptual puzzles.
Quoting AmadeusD
That much is apparent. That's not at all what I am proposing. I'm just pointing out that there are moral truths. The inability of your theorising to deal with this simple observation perhaps tells us, not to reject moral truths, but your theorising.
Where did i indicate my standard applied to others?
The fact you have an opinion or preference does not mean you are expressing a belief about something being objectively correct. Saying ice cream is delicious doesn't mean that it is objectively correct. Saying you want your local sports team to play a certain way doesn'y mean it is objectively correct. Wishing people were more interested in art doesn't mean it is objectively correct to like art.
When I first heard someone say they were a moral anti-realist I also had the reaction of sonething like: "what... how can you not think certain things are wrong" but its not that they dont believe things are wrong. Every antirealist has ethical opinions. They just don't think their opinions have an objective basis.
No one has claimed such a thing.
Quoting Banno
I reject your position. You haven't defended it adequately, and so i remain unconvinced. Im not asking you to make any psychological moves - But i am pointing out that your descriptions and expositions are very much wanting to my mind. If you're to reject my 'theorizing', so be it. That doesn't actual say anything about the truth of your position. I may agree with that position, but that doesn't make it true.
Quoting Banno
Trying my best to remain credulous, no. But that is given my above position, i suppose. It just plum has nothing to support it as a conclusion running from your opinion about slavery.
Quoting Banno
Ethics is the study and discussion of the benchmarks that inform morals( to my understanding, and from what i can tell, the general population including philosophers). They seem adequately different to be potentially decoupled, or conjoined by context.
Further, no, it isn't anything like that. Ethics is how to get your framework in place. Morals is how to apply that framework to your behaviour (in answering what i take to be your query here viz. what do i actually mean by these terms).
Quoting Banno
Apply this to what you've proposed, at any point in these collected exchanges. I smell a lot of fish.
Your belief that moral truths exist doesn't entail that they actually do. It entails that you believe them. Which is the totality of my point, highlighted in a specific instance. And as best i can tell, your beliefs rest upon your beliefs. And at this stage, I am getting the distinct impression your position jhust boils down to "Well, I believe these moral statements are true. You can reject that, and that's fine, but they're still true". I just don't buy that line.
Quoting Banno
If this has been the impression, I have misspoken. I am acutely aware that ethical positions inform moral decisions. I am just under the impression that barely anyway has a clue what their ethical positions are and operate from (what i read to be) similar brute statements are you're employing to support teh abstract position that moral truth exists. So, as mentioned many, many times, i accept that for you some ethical statements may be true because you cannot conceive otherwise. I'm just not in that position. Seems a fairly simple divergence that we should be able to just recognized and see for what it is.
Quoting Banno
This I'm certainly picking up. Subjective statements can be 'true'. Like Jones is in Barcelona :snicker:
Quoting Banno
*claiming. You've yet to say anything that indicates to me that statement is anything but a over-wrought subjective claim. But i have no issue with this, because that's my ground position anyway LOL
So, where does my deduction, given above, go astray?
Set it out.
It seems to me to be no more than a T-sentence. If one accepts that one ought not keep slaves, then one accepts that "One ought not keep slaves" is true. Where does this go wrong?
That it doesn't establish it's truth. It establishes any given S's belief in it's truth. I note a very subtle, but incredibly important difference between "..therefore X is true" and "..Therefore S believes X is true".
Sure - you can believe it or not. The example is chosen because it is so commonly believed. Like the puppies or eating babies.
So do you think it is true? Should folk keep slaves? Kick puppies for fun?
But moreover, if you think folk ought not keep slaves, how could you not be committed to concluding that "One ought not keep slaves" is true?
Quoting AmadeusD
My suspicion, from what you have written, is that you are only now becoming aware of the implications of this.
You're welcome.
No. It think its the best option given te information I have, when input to the values i hold.
I would need to be confident in my own ideas to such a degree (one i can't fathom) that my beliefs entail teh truth of them. I just don't make that move. And i can't really see how anyone could, and be entirely comfortable with it (that is, without some supervening source of ethics like revelation. Then you just believe what you're told and it's air tight). Quoting Banno
No. It was my entire point. One which i took extreme pains to try to very carefully map out over your responses. Apparently, i failed. But i thank you not :snicker: This appears to some thing necessarily ignored by your responses to mine. So, I don't think either of us could have done a great job here :lol:
Uhh yes, I think you are implying exactly this when you say...
Quoting Leontiskos
You are implying that someone saying that torturing babies is not a stance independent moral fact also believes that torturing babies is not wrong.
Let me offer another story. One fellow responded to my moral anger argument as follows. "Anger presupposes justice, but because moral realism is false justice does not exist. Therefore anger is irrational. Nevertheless, I myself do get angry with other people. This is only because I am irrational. If I ever succeed in becoming perfectly rational I will no longer get angry."
Well, fair enough! That is an example of thoroughgoing moral anti-realism. Still, I don't find such a position cogent or appealing.
How does your previous claim about preferences follow from this? In any case, I will just quote Banno:
Quoting Banno
So you are not confident in your conviction that folk ought not keep slaves. Ok.
You are not being asked to be certain beyond any doubt. You are being asked if you think folk ought be allowed to keep slaves. And if you think folk ought not be allowed to keep slaves, then can you explain how it does not follow that you think "folk ought not be allowed to keep slaves" is true?
I'll take this one: You can act without believing your act to comport with truth. Im unsure why that's difficult. I outline to Banno that a direct answer is that to act in accordance with what i think is the best judgement of the information/data available to me doesnt entail that judgement's truth, or that i must necessarily take it to be true. It only need be the best among the options I see ahead of me, for any given decision to act.
Additionally, I could believe a course of action is 'right', despite not relying on a truth to inform the action.
I personally think Israel is probably wrong in it's current actions. But that's amenable to immediate update if new data is available to me. If i believed they were wrong, i would necesasrily have to also believe, with certainty, some data which informed that belief. I don't. I don't even think that's available to me. So, I hold belief (such as a belief is a strongly-held, lively impression of a judgement) that Israel is likely wrong (disproportionate, at least) in it's current actions.
That doesn't require me to think it's true. It is just the best explanation I can rely on to inform any kind of moral decision. Luckily, i'm not involved lol.
Parenting has thousands of these situations - you have to believe what you're doing is 'right', without ever having to believe the data is true on which you've based the decision to do that thing.
I just did. I don't mean this to be rude - but it appears you might just plum not have read my response to this same question in the post you're quoting:
"It think its the best option given te information I have, when input to the values i hold."
That doesn't require me to believe it's true. It requires me to believe it's the best option.
Quoting Banno
Bit underhanded. I'm confident that its the best option, and so my conviction to it is sound. I just don't claim it's true, in any sense that isn't entirely predicated on my disposition in light of the data available to me personally (i.e that which i'm aware of, rather than could (lets say easily) become aware of).
Quoting Leontiskos
Because you can talk about someones ethical beliefs as opinions or preferences like that.
I don't see an inherent difference between a preference such as " I don't think my favourite sports team should play in such a manner " and an ethical statement like " people should be nice ". Both are framed normatively in terms of what should be done but I don't necessarily think the idea that my favourite sports team should play in a particular way is an objective fact. In the same way, just because someone thinks torturing babies is wrong, doesn't mean they think it is an objective stance independent fact.
Quoting Banno
I mean, there are lots of moral anti-realists across the world who would disagree with this sentiment. This rhetoric is not really more than question begging moral facts.
Wouldn’t it then be true that you believe it to be the best option? “Best” means “most good”. Hence, you’d be affirming that you judge “one not owning slaves is the best (most good) option” to be true. In other words, you are affirming that the stated proposition conforms to the objective reality of what is good by being most proximate to it, this given the other options available. But this, then, would be realism, since it presupposes an objective, else impartially real, good by which standard you are judging not owning slaves to be a best option.
"Chocolate ice cream is the best," is a preference. Perhaps you construe, "Do not torture babies," as a preference as well. The difference is that when we see someone torturing a baby, we prevent them; whereas when we see someone eating vanilla ice cream, we do not prevent them.
Now you are confusing truth with certainty. Sure, you can act without being certain. So you are not certain that folk ought not keep slaves - perhaps a lack of moral fortitude leads you here - but you act on the basis that folk ought not keep slaves. That is, you act on the basis that "Folk ought not keep slaves" is true.
it doesn't matter which propositional attitude you frame it with; the T-sentence sits on its own.
So your reply doesn't help you avoid ascribing truth values to moral statements.
Same reply to
No. I did cover this. It is explicitly not entailed by acting on what is thought to be the best option. My own fallibility precludes me from concluding that my best intuitions correlate with 'truth'. I don't even think my deductive reasoning could be truth-apt in that sense. If you reduce the claim to it being true, that it is the best option among those in front of me, that's the case. But that doesn't touch the truth of the statement itself.
No, I don't. And i have explicitly covered why not multiple times, so i'm refrain from repeating my very much coherent answer to this charge again. Quoting Banno
It sits on it's own, while completely failing to rise to the status of truth. Because its self-referential and tautological. So, yeah. I reject your position and your reasoning on the basis that is not good lol. It's just a way of sophistically remaining convinced your opinions represent truths.
Quoting Banno
yes it does. A repeat of the first response in this comment.
I think we may be done. But i pointed that out a long time ago.
But I'll let others continue the debate.
Rhetoric?
It's not a sentiment; it's an observation about English. "The sky is blue" is true if and only if the sky is blue. Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s/s if and only if "Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8m/s/" is true.
But for some reason, folk refuse to apply this to statements counting "ought". Special pleading.
Those who deny this usually claim either that moral statements are not truth-apt; or that they are, but are all false. Which path will you choose?
Maybe your answer is not as clear as you think.
But keep working on it.
edit:
Quoting AmadeusD
The T-sentence is exactly about truth. It does not address belief.
Again, keep thinking.
We;re getting somewhere... :P
Or... so strange, i know... maybe... You're not supporting your point in such a great way? That's my conclusion. So, as i say. I think we're probably done :)
It's been a very interesting and entertaining exchange. I don't require you to change your mind, and i've not seen anything that would push me in that direction either so... I simply tip my hat to another on the path.
Quoting Banno
Now we have been through this discussion, set out where this goes astray.
Perhaps philosophy is not as simple as folk might suppose.
Quoting Banno
It sounds like you have an inferiority complex about engineering.
It's pleasing that folk take an interest in philosophy. Engineering is not necessarily good preparation for such conceptual work.
I think the philosophy bug is something you're born with anyway. There are a number of philosophical problems in the realm of engineering. If engineers were prone to becoming stumped by them they wouldn't be able to work.
I supose if the philosophers are being paid, their efforts are seen as worthwhile.
That sounds really interesting. It'll be cool to see what they come up with.
Hrmm, not sure. Sometimes I use the boards to think out loud and sometimes it's more piffle than substance. I'm going with that now. I was thinking how the verb shouldn't matter when translating sentences into a logic, and so it would also go with facts. But in that spirit I was just using silly examples that follow the form, in the same way that we use silly examples to demonstrate validity (like "if the moon was made of green cheese" etc.)
In another logic, though, you would track the predicates. So... meh. Just some fluff in trying to lay out a way of thinking.
It is not tautological, because P1 is not “the totality of existence is reality”: it is “the way reality is does not entail how it ought to be”. The point is that the moral realist (presumably) needs to deny this claim in order to save moral facts, and I find P1 very plausible (so I am inclined to disagree with them.
You are importing the metaphysical framework of moral realism and trying to force-fit it into moral anti-realism, such that you end up committing a straw man fallacy.
I think you should not torture babies, irregardless of whether you think you should not torture babies, and if that is true then I should be trying to stop you. Where’s the inconsistency or incoherence with that?
I won’t speak towards that person, but I completely disagree with them. I think moral realism sometimes paints the false narrative that, even under that metaethical theory, we cannot impose tastes on one another; but I can provide a parody argument, which equally applies to moral realism and anti-realism, which illustrates how false this notion really is.
Values are not morals: they are our subjective tastes of what we hold as worth something. I can value vanilla ice cream, and you not so much—irregardless of what the moral facts say. Now, imagine there’s a moral fact such that ‘one shouldn’t torture babies’ and you catch me in the act of torturing a baby: you cannot impose the moral fact without simultaneously imposing your taste that I should value moral facts. If you say “hey! You shouldn’t be doing that because it violates this moral fact!”, and I just say “why should I care about moral facts?”. What moral fact would you possibly try to cite to justify the value of moral facts themselves? None, of course! You would cite your valuing of them. But...wait a second...according to your moral realist view you shouldn’t ever impose tastes on another, which would include your taste about moral facts. Are you just going to stand there and let me continue torturing the baby because you can’t enforce the moral fact without shoving your values down my throat? Of course not! So why would it be any different with respect to morals under a moral anti-realist view? It wouldn’t.
If this is for me, I have. Multiple times, and have now decided to refrain from repeating myself.
It's an opinion, and nothing more. I reject that it's a fact, or state of affairs and you've not adequately defending either stance. So, again, I think we're done. I'm trying my absolute best to end this exchange respectfully. But I am getting the distinct feeling you're under the impression you have an empirically verifiable position - something to which this claim is not amenable, in my mind.
So there we go. Tip my hat once more.
:ok:
I am thinking of moral anti-realism as the idea that, to use your own words,
Quoting Bob Ross
Answered here:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting Bob Ross
But I am not the one saying anything; you are. That's the whole point. You are the one enforcing a prohibition on the torture of babies. Why must we all obey your so-called "taste"? What makes it special? You are the one on the bench, here. You are the one engaged in moral realism. Whether you can square this with your rhetorical utterances remains to be seen.
Edit:
Quoting Bob Ross
You are presumably saying, "The moral realist imposes his tastes, so why can't I impose mine!?" First, the notion that the moral realist is imposing tastes begs the question at hand. Second, tastes are not imposable by their very nature. When we talk about a taste that's part of what we mean. Third, just because your opponent engages in a practice you believe to be arbitrary does not give you license to engage in arbitrary practices, and this is particularly true when you are in the process of criticizing the supposed arbitrariness. Fourth, if you are imposing a moral standard of any kind then I would say you aren't a moral anti-realist. The moral anti-realist eschews objective moral values just as much as they eschew objective moral "facts".
It is a statement of belief. If you don't have something of more substance than to just repeat the statement, in the face of this objection, we have no further ground to cover. As i've noted multiple times.
Hmmm. this comes across entirely a non sequitur in the face of what Bob Ross has outlined.
He is, from what i can make out, making an emotionalist argument against moral realism. So far, it's not been addressed very well. Moral statements are instances of a subject expressing their taste as a universal rule. What makes this not true? In the case of the babies vs the ice cream, the only move that needs to be made is moving from your taste, that babies ought not be tortured, to a statement that no one should do it. Nothing of substance changes there, just a delivery method apt for a wider audience than merely one's self.
If you've got the inverse of this as an overview of hte exchange, I think you may be misreading.
Given that i take both of you to have avoided the problem you face entirely (including in this comment - which is condescending and bizarre in many ways), suffice to say this is no skin off my nose.
I hope to remain in good faith going forward :) Take care mate.
Quoting AmadeusD
Because it's not binding and therefore provides no defense for the imposition of moral claims. Unless Ross was trying to resurrect the bogey of Hare's universal prescriptivism, which he was almost certainly not attempting to do. Those who hold the type of emotivism you are describing do not generally also hold that moral statements are binding. Taste does not bind, and is not the stuff of argument. To say that the moralist is expressing a taste is to make an excuse to ignore them.
Thank you for this. That is, happily, not what I was saying. I, in fact, whether wrong or right, indicated my understanding was exactly that what you say is true, abs therefore statements of the kind “one ought not kick puppies” is a statement of taste only and so is emotiovism I’m action.
I am not seeing either you or Banno making statements that aren’t emotivist. They are just statements that express your opinion as a command. I assumed I was wrong at every turn and sought anything at all which would traverse the taste-truth gap but I saw nought to that effect. That is why I cannot even conceive of the positions you two have taken. They are just fingers in ears
Edit; I am typing on a phone on a bus. Forgive the inevitable typing errors
Correct.
Correct. I never claimed that, I said:
I am a moral cognitivist, just not a moral realist. For moral subjectivism, technically, moral judgments are rewritten as indexical or specifically referencing a particular judgment (e.g., ‘one ought not torture babies’ ? ‘I think/believe one ought not torture babies’ or ‘Bob Ross thinks/believes ...’).
I think you may be under the impression that a moral cognitivist anti-realism is impossible, since all true propositions are objectively binding; but when rewritten it is clear that the belief is what is enveloped in the proposition, which, in turn, envelopes the moral judgment.
This completely missed my point: you sidestepped/derailed it with your response. I pointed out that you cannot impose a moral fact without imposing a taste, and you responded essentially with ‘preferences, by definition, are not imposable’. I just gave you an example of how they are necessarily imposed (in order to impose facts): what say you?
Obviously, as a side note, I disagree that preferences are, by definition, not imposable; and, just to clarify, I was not saying that the vanilla ice cream is equivocal to the torturing babies example: they are analogious insofar as tastes exist in both irregardless (and validly irregardless) of the moral facts. I agree that we normally wouldn’t care about someone’s favorite ice cream vs. we would about torturing babies: I am just noting that even in a moral realist’s framework they are imposing their taste that one should value the moral fact (that one ought not torture babies) when stopping that person from torturing the baby (even though it is a moral fact that one shouldn’t be doing that). You haven’t really addressed this point as of yet.
Come on, Leontiskos! This is clearly a derailment and straw man! I gave you a hypothetical to prove a point: that your moral realist principle that “tastes cannot be imposed” is incoherent with your position. Instead of dealing with that hypothetical scenario and demonstrating why it isn’t, you shifted the burden of proof (for some reason) on me. Now, to answer your question (which has nothing to do with my scenario I gave you):
I am not saying that you should be convinced that you shouldn’t be doing X because I think you shouldn’t be doing X: I am saying that I am going to try and stop you. First, I will try to intellectually and rationally convince you otherwise. In moral subjectivism, this is going to look different than moral realism, since my objective is not to convince you that it is factually true that you ought not do X. Instead, there are some other avenues to explore:
1. Tease out false beliefs you have about yourself. You may say “I don’t believe that I ought not do X” but, under moral subjectivism (being that moral judgments are cognitive beliefs which are the upshot of one’s conative psyche), that doesn’t thereby make it true (relative to you). Most people are really bad at psycho-analysis, and if I can tease out to you that you actually do believe you ought not do X, then I have succeeded in my own goal.
2. Latch onto higher prioritized moral beliefs you have, and show that accepting that hypothetical imperative logically or plausibly entails that you ought not do X. You may initially be against being obligated not to do X, but if I can get you to agree to another hypothetical imperative and show you that it is logically inconsistent with your denial of the hypothetical imperative [that one ought not do X], then you are forced to choose one or the other. Most likely, since the former is higher prioritized, you will flip your position on the latter and I have succeed in my own goal.
3. Disputing the supplemental non-moral facts. It could be that you and I agree about the underlying moral judgments that I am using to commit myself to ‘I ought not do X’ but that the supplementing non-moral fact is disputed. This aspect of the conversation follows the normal realist discussion that a moral realist wants for moral judgments (but I deny), since there is a fact-of-the-matter about the non-moral facts.
4. If 1-3 don’t work, then I may try other nuanced tactics, but, for brevity, I will not include them here.
5. The last resort, for moral realist and anti-realist alike, is violence.
I have no clue what you are talking about. I think I have made it clear that I am not engaging in any affirmation of moral facts, and I have shown how my theory deals with this (as shown above quite explicitly).
Perhaps the issue is similar to one I had with Banno: they said that if someone proclaims something which they apply to everyone, then it is categorically not a taste. This is just so incredibly false (by my lights) and perhaps this kind of thinking is your motivation for saying I am engaging in moral realism. In order for Banno to be right here, they have to deny that I can have a subjective taste that everyone should abide by my taste [about something]: which seems blatantly false to me.
No. I am saying that it is incoherent, as a moral realist, for you to say that tastes are not imposable on other people since you do it to impose the moral facts (necessarily). You still haven’t demonstrated how this is false.
Not at all. I am not claiming, in that hypothetical, that moral realists are imposing tastes that are moral judgments, which would clearly beg the question, but rather that their values are being imposed on other people (which are subjective tastes). That is why I explicitly put at the beginning of it that “Values are not morals: they are our subjective tastes of what we hold as worth something”.
Exactly, this is what I am contending with as an internal critique of moral realism. You can’t coherently claim, or as the story goes, that tastes are not imposable and turn around and impose your value of the moral fact on me in order to stop me from torturing the baby. You still haven’t addressed this.
Two things:
1. I don’t consider the vast majority of subjective tastes to be arbitrary.
2. I do think that if it is inevitable that we impose tastes on each other, then most reasonable people would find that to be a license to impose them on each other. If you can’t impose moral facts without imposing your valueing of the moral facts, then you cannot have one over the other. Honestly, if you deny that tastes can be imposed on other people, then you will have to lie down and starve to death. There’s nothing you can do in this world which will not impose, to some degree, your tastes on other people: irregardless if moral realism is true.
This is patently false. Moral anti-realism is the denial of one of three things:
1. Moral judgments are propositional (moral cognitivism).
2. Moral judgments express something objective (moral objectivism).
3. There are at least some true moral judgments.
Denying any of these lands you in moral anti-realist territory. Denying just 1 lands you in moral non-cognitivism; denying just 2 in moral subjectivism; and just 3 in moral nihilism.
You have attempted to define moral realism such that it is ‘anyone who imposes a moral standard’, which includes subjective and objective standards, and this is just not what moral realism is at all. Perhaps you are presupposing that standards are always objective, then clearly I am not a moral realist since I impose subjective ‘standards’.
Seems arbitrary. I don't see what going out of your way to prevent something entails about dtance independent moral facts. At the same time, many bad things happen which you do not or would not necessarily go out of your way to prevent. I'm sure there are examples too of people imposing their preferences on others if they feel strongly about it.
:ok:
If saying that *a moral statement* is true means that they are saying *that such a statement* is a stance-independent fact then why should they *apply T-sentences* if they don't think *that the moral statement* is a stance-independent fact? Doesn't seem to follow. To apply the T-sentence is to assume the phrases make sense in the first place, which some might *not* believe *to be the case for moral statements*, if they have a reason to.
Quoting Banno
I don't think I really have a strong opinion on that particularly right now.
Edit: Some housekeeping on comment just for better clarity (hopefully); additions marked within * ... *.
Such a good way of setting this out - and I think what i would reference here is the ethical considerations around vegetarianism.
You get quotes from folk like Parfit and Singer to the effect that it is inarguable that we, objectively, should all be vegetarian.
That's merely a strong preference - but these people spent/spend decades trying to convince people of their point of view. They believe it's 'true'. Yet, fail entirely to actually establish that that is the case. Many take that further and become violent because of this conviction. I've been physically attacked (not in any way that put me in real danger) for refusing a (really bad) argument for vegetarianism in public. So, this taste can absolutely be imposed on others - its just that those imposing it don't consider it a taste. They are wrong.
T-sentences are about true, not belief.
Quoting AmadeusD
Was that your argument?
If the tree is a Eucalypt, then it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you believe that the tree is a Eucalypt, then you believe that it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you doubt that the tree is a Eucalypt, then you doubt that it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you understand that the tree is a Eucalypt, then you understand that it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you suspect that the tree is a Eucalypt, then you suspect that it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you are 98% certain that the tree is a Eucalypt, then you are 98% certain that it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If you act as if the tree is a Eucalypt, then you act as if it is true that "The tree is a Eucalypt"
If one ought not keep slaves, then it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you believe that one ought not keep slaves, then you believe that it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you doubt that one ought not keep slaves, then you doubt that it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you understand that one ought not keep slaves, then you understand that it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you suspect that one ought not keep slaves, then you suspect that it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you are 98% certain that one ought not keep slaves, then you are 98% certain that it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
If you act as if one ought not keep slaves, then you act as if it is true that "One ought not keep slaves"
Your point is pointless.
"stance-independent fact"?
There are "non-stance-independent facts"? And these are not true?
I don't see any meat in your posts. I'm not at all sure of your point.
HI Banno... Hmm..This is likely to be my last reply in this exchange and so f'ing help me i will stick to that, unless something fruitful comes of it.
I act in accordance with my thought. My thought is not that it's true, but that its best practice. It is a sentiment i hold. Not a claim i make about hte world. I don't make that claim. I just behave in accordance with the claim, accepting it could never be 'true'. Reject that? I don't care. That's how it is.
You've elsewhere admitted that these claims can only rise to the level of heuristics anyway, so i literally don't understand what's going on.. Can't for the life of me figure out how your mind works mate, but its fascinating.
Quoting Banno
That/if you do not see a significant linguistic and philosophically important difference between statement 1. about "It is " or not and 2. about "One ought..." or not, I'm unsure this can be helped. I anticipate "It is the case that it is a Eucalypt" vs "It is the case that one ought..." as an objection. It isn't one. That sentence is the same with extra words. They contain the exact same distinction between them. Is/ought.
One is about a state of affairs that actually exists (As you point out, if it's a Eucalypt, then its true to claim it is) and one is your claim about what want to exist (the state of it being wrong to own slaves) and does not reference anything in the world (it references something in your head) - coupled with your claim that is is a state of affairs, rather than your belief in one. It is a claim. Not a fact. This is the exact is/ought distinction.
You've nothing to add to your claim, but to further claim that it's also true, rather than a mere claim.
Have you just plum forgotten to provide anything more than the claim? Or are you saying that acting in accordance with it rises it to the level of truth? So far, no mechanism between the claim and it's truth have come forward (see below for the 'brute fact' issue).
The bold is the exact non sequitur I've been trying to tease out of you. Thank you. What in the world does it refer to?? What would confirm or defeat this claim?? IF it were true, then that would make the claim true. But, you've not established that it's true. Your opinion is the single piece of data in support of the claim (or, perhaps an aggregate of other opinions appended) couple with a claim that its a brute fact. Except that amounts only to the claim it could be a brute fact, if ever shown to be true. If you concede, without qualification that it's a 'brute fact' that you can't prove, then what the heck has this exchange even been (refer also here to your concession that its heuristics all the way down).
So, "Your claim is true for you" (my position) cannot be addressed by your use of 'truth' here. Its entirely self-referential and is patently, inarguably and inescapably merely your subjective assessment of hte world. Which is fine. We don't even need to deal with what would make it objective here.
If you reject that, please stop wasting my time as i've respectfully noted we have nothing more to discuss. This is literally an is/ought distinction and that you're not getting it is just tedious to me. I would posit if you're going to repeat yourself in more words, this is a waste of both our times and i request you not bother.
Quoting Banno
Not necessarily. I am just implying that people may be able to use such sentences such as "you ought to do this" without necessarily meaning it in a way of expressing beliefs about stance independent *facts*.
Expressions such as *you ought to do this* may have other meanings or uses that do not have to be related to stance independent facts. I am skeptical that there are always determinate meanings behind the way that people use certain words in everyday life, let alone meanings that coincide with how philosophers might interpret those words in an academic setting. After all, people can use *words like truth* and concepts of right and wrong without any kind of formal training or education. I think people can plausibly use sentences like "you ought to do this" or even use the word "true" in ways that are not as strict as what is being talked about with more rigorous philosophical frameworks.
I therefore don't think that just because someone can say "you ought to do this" or "it's true that you ought to do this" has to imply the kind of T-sentence framework you are using *because people are not necessarily expressing a fact*.
Edit: some mistakes and added clarity **
I mean't stance-independent moral fact. If moral statements aren't about facts in the first place then they may not be amenable to the T-sentence thing. If they then think that "you ought to do this" it may not be obliged that they are saying that "you ought to do this is true". They may even find perhaps that "it is a stance independent fact that you ought to do this" is false of they want to.
That just takes us back to the first few pages, about whether facts are just true statements or if the term is to be restricted to only physical states.
Quoting Banno
I simply repeated what you had already said, adding an observation about forum etiquette.
Listen mate, I understand that obtuseness comes natural; but I’m here to have fun.
Far be it from me ;)
So it seems. :wink:
Hehe.
“We ought to get on well”.
I’m just trying to get back to a place of good faith, whether we think the other has missed a specific point in a specific thread being irrelevant :) that’s all.
Quoting Banno
Well I would say that just because people seem to assign truth values doesn't mean that that is necessarily what they mean; I don't think there is even necessarily determinate what people mean when they use the word "true" in everyday scenarios. It may not even be determinate in philosophical conversations and people clearly have different explicit philosophical notions of what truth means.
I think maybe the central issue is that regardless of whether one has the prior belief that there is such a thing as moral facts or not, I don't see how the use of T-sentences can be a strong argument since people can just deny they use language in a certain way. Its difficult to see how what people say about their own language use can be rebutted just through this existence of this scheme. If people use language one way, and others use it another way, then how can language use in itself tell you anything about whether something is actually truth-apt in an objective sense? I think it's a framework for how people talk about truth but I fail to see how it can be an argument for truth.
Fucksake. Yea, people may not mean what they say nor say what they mean, so we might as well just give away the whole thing hey?
Well I think its less about saying "we might as well kust give away the whole thing" and more that some people just genuinely don't believe in the "whole thing" in the firsr place.
Then you think people should do what they are in no way bound to do, which is a contradiction. Your statement is a perfect example of a moral judgment, and you are even introducing the notion of truth.
Quoting Bob Ross
Why would you try to stop someone from doing something which is not objectively wrong (i.e. something that is not wrong for them or for all)? (Of course it makes no difference how you try to stop them.)
Quoting Bob Ross
Your beliefs and your actions with regard to torturing babies constitute a moral judgment (3). Your claims are "subject-referencing prescriptive statements," for you are prescribing how other subjects ought to act. This isn't rocket science. You enforce your belief that no one should torture babies, and therefore you are a moral realist. This is the contradiction I have been pointing to: you are a moral realist while simultaneously claiming that moral realism is false. You can't just run around encouraging/arguing/forcing others to act in certain ways and claim you are not a moral realist.
More concisely, "Thou shalt not torture babies," is a moral judgment, and one that you affirm to be true.
As an aside, this thread has become sophistry-ville. :confused:
(please keep in mind I am not defending, particularly, anything here - I am nutting out ideas and approaching tehse things as a pretty green amateur philosopher)
I just cannot see in your exchange where that's established but i run into the huge problem that i don't engage other people's morals for the (imo subjective) reason that i don't feel adequately omniscient to perceive my moral standards as applicable to others. So, i act-out exactly what you're saying in practice (i.e, i take morals to be subjective, and therefore do not attempt to enforce my morals on others), but I don't actually see why i couldn't without a contradiction getting in the middle (treatment of 'enforce' below - whcih i think is relevant).
Can it be the case that, at the apex of my considerations(judgement), a certain behaviour appears moral/immoral, and so I enforce that judgement to the degree that I am acting on it toward other people, and yet am open to their response motivating or informing an adjustment in my judgement?
I think this allows for "running around encouraging/arguing.." but not forcing. But then, do you consider my behaving in line with my (subjective) moral considerations, forcing them on those I interact with, or does 'enforcement' only apply to aattempt to change their behaviour?
To judge an action is to hold that it should have occurred or should not have occurred, with reference to the person acting. It doesn't matter whether we "think," "suggest," "opine," "suppose," "admonish," "argue," "force," et al. In each case the judgment of action is occurring (moral judgment). Tentative judgments are still judgments. Abductive judgments are still judgments (judgments to the best possibility, or judgments from significantly limited information). Judgments which are open to correction or revision are still judgments.
The posts of yours that I have read always contain something like, "Well, the judgment is abductive so it isn't really a moral judgment." That's not right. It's still a moral judgment, it's just a moral judgment formed or acted upon with less certitude.
does the same thing when he says that he only thinks that others should not torture babies (and he thinks this independently of others' beliefs, and he will act to prevent them by force if necessary). His claim here is something like, "I only think, I don't know, therefore I am not a moral realist." This is incorrect for the same reason outlined above. A tentative moral judgment is still a moral judgment, and I would further argue that a moral judgment that one is prepared to act upon decisively is not a particularly tentative judgment.
Hmm. I imagine i'm being linguistically imprecise then (or i've been unnecessarily reactionary to challenges), as this is not what i think. I'm happy to call it a judgement. I just think that entails that i believe the truth of the judgement. I do think a tentative judgement precludes me from assigning 'truth' to it, personally but again, I'm not at the stage that i could enunciate this well. I take an internal sense of 'true' to entail a certitude that I don't apply to my moral judgements.
I think I have pinpointed the crux of our disagreement (and let me know what you think): it is twofold. Firstly, you believe that someone is a moral realist if they accept #3 (i.e., “There are at least some true moral judgments.”), whereas I believe one needs to accept all three prongs of the thesis (that I outlined before). Secondly, you believe that there is it is illegitimate to impose a taste on another person.
With respect to the first point, I think this is just wrong, in the sense that this is not a standard definition of moral realism. The contemporary view holds those three prongs, which makeup of the moral realist thesis in its most generic form, and rejecting even one of them entails anti-realism. If you think that #3 (and I would presume #1 as well) are all that are required to be a realist, then, by your definition, I am a realist. I simply do not agree with the semantics.
So, to clarify:
I wholly agree: moral subjectivism agrees with moral anti-realism insofar as it also affirms there are true moral judgments—they just don’t express anything objective (hence the denial of #2). Again, because I don’t care about semantics, if all you mean by moral realism is #1 and #3 (thereby omitting #2), then, if I were to use your terms, I would be a moral realist: I just don’t, at the end of the day, accept that schema.
And on more clarification (on point 1):
Nope. I affirm that “I believe thou shalt not torture babies”. Unless you think those are equivalent propositions, then we should be able to agree that moral judgments, under moral subjectivism, clearly violate prong #2 of the moral realist thesis (as I have outlined it at least).
In short: you are confusing moral judgments with what they express; and that can be either subjectivity or objectivity.
With respect to the second point, here’s why I reject any notion of prohibiting the impositions of tastes is because it is impossible not to (re:, revisit my scenario I gave of you shoving your values down my throat to stop me from torturing babies). Beyond rejecting that principle, I also reject that moral realists (like yourself) can coherently affirm it (because if you were to take it seriously you would not be able to impose facts either, as mentioned before). What do you disagree about this?
And, finally, let me address:
I never once said this. I never once even implied this. I completely agree that there are true moral judgments: I affirm prong #3 [and #1 by the way] of the 3-pronged moral realist thesis and this is why I am a moral subjectivist, which is a form of moral anti-realism. You have to accept all three to be a moral realist: it makes no difference if morals are truth-apt and there are true moral judgments if those judgments express something non-objective.
It is also worth mentioning that my belief in the moral judgments is, under moral subjectivism, an upshot of my psychology and not a fact about the stance-independent world (which is what a moral realist is going to hold).
They may be different but I don't think that difference entails anything to do with truth. Nothing has been presented to suggest that imo.
I think my same point applies to the question of truth, as judgments always relate to truth. But if you want to say that "true" means "true with a high degree of certitude," then you are of course able to say that one or more of your moral judgments are not "true" in that sense. In any case, this seems to go right back to my point about tentativeness.
What would you think about a visceral uneasiness is calling it 'true'? I don't know whether my behaviour is correct. It's the best i can envisage. I feels awful to claim that as truth. Any comments there?
It seems that I did somewhat misread your three conditions, but you already agreed to my own definition:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Bob Ross
No, I don't think so. According to the standard view, someone who accepts objective moral values is a moral realist. What source are you using?
Again, my definition pertains to the bindingness of a moral prescription, and you agreed to that definition. Are you withdrawing your agreement?
Quoting Bob Ross
I assume this is a typo and you meant to say "moral realism."
Quoting Bob Ross
"I believe the proposition, but that doesn't mean I think it's true." This is the sort of sophistry that has led me to avoid your threads on these topics. Anyway, let's just go back to the definition that I already gave and you already agreed to, because that was constructed so as to avoid these sophistic responses.
Quoting Bob Ross
This all goes back to the bindingness I have already brought up. Your moral judgment depends on a moral norm. If others are not bound by that moral norm, then what in the world gives you the right to force them to obey it? If the moral norm does not objectively apply to their actions, then why are you applying it to their actions? This claim of "subjectivism" is ad hoc, and that is what I disagree with. Enforcing moral norms that you claim are not binding is irrational, even if it is called "subjectivism."
I think it's a cultural problem. In the West we are culturally (and morally) conditioned "not to judge others," and therefore we are uneasy with moral judgments. But it seems to me that this is unhelpful because moral judgments are unavoidable. Then there is the additional philosophical problem of grounding moral judgments, which is also particularly Western.
There are some people who try to obey this conditioning, and try to at least never act on the basis of their moral judgments (of others). That may be possible (and it may not be), but I think it's unhealthy either way. The way forward seems to be the virtue of humility. Embrace moral realism while simultaneously embracing humility. Form and enact moral judgments in a way that is neither brash nor shortsighted. Like truth, morality is best accepted willingly and arrived at via persuasion. Once it is admitted that moral propositions are truth-apt, persuasion becomes a possibility. Morality is largely social, so it is in everyone's best interest to know moral truth and to move forward in unison, with argument and dialogue to the fore.
You are a legal professional. Law is the most practical form of morality, and it is a social reality. As a society we agree that certain actions are impermissible and we lock people up for decades in prisons for carrying out these actions (things like murder, rape, pedophilia, etc.). I hope there is some certitude that these actions are actually wrong! (I don't mean to open up the law-morality debate. Again, I am defining a moral judgment as a judgment of a person's action.)
Anyway, sorry for the snippy post earlier. These morality threads drive me a little crazy, and therefore I try to limit the number of my interlocutors.
(Awhile back I drafted a thread on why all acts are moral acts, or at least all interpersonal acts. It seems there might be some interest if I ever get around to finishing it.)
Thank you! Really appreciate the considered reply! Even a polite rejection is fine by my lights :nerd:
I am doing my best to try not to annoy people so, snippiness is a good indicator (as long it's not gratuitous!). I understand why, too. You'll have seen from several exchanges that I just do not see what moral realists see. I cannot make the connection they make either semantically or conceptually between an act and its rightness or wrongness per se, rather than apropos of a chosen framework. So it is very frustrating, I think, from any perspective to be discussing these things as though we could convince someone of the POV (see below for why your notion of persuasion isn't part of my moral framework, really, other than incidentally - although, i would just note for my own peace of mind here, there is no consensus).
Unfortunately, as I (currently) reject the notion of moral truth in the sense of objectivity, this extrapolation is fairly much unintelligible as a 'way forward' for me but I (think) I grok what's being said regardless, from the realist perspective and it's consistent and helpful.
I have, elsewhere, today, had to alter my formulation of truth, though, and so I could, imagine, with quite little force be convinced of moral 'truth' as long as it's a relative truth.
Quoting Leontiskos
Tricky. Unless you're a legal positivist (Leiter, anyone?) this is not very clear. Things have evolved over time, but drug laws are a very front-and-center example of why your conception probably isn't actually the way things are. I don't really see the law as moral. It's pragmatic and usually, really bad.
I think there are some widely-held views that make their way into law, and that's fine. I don't really think much beyond that. This is why i think activism is great, but faulty. You probably should speak up if you think a law/regulation is wrong. But it's faulty because activism necessarily requires a moral certitude that i don't think is warranted (ever).
The question is not whether moral statements are truth-apt. They clearly are.
The problem is, are the moral systems against which moral statements are true or false themselves truth-apt? Here I think not.
In real world propositions, there are generally two levels of truth: truth against the operating framework, and the truth of the framework itself.
For example:
"The Triune God is one being which is simultaneously three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit"
Is a true statement within the framework of Catholic doctrine. This is entirely independent of the truth of the framework itself.
You can see this with the proposition:
"The Triune God is one being which is simultaneously three: Frogger, Sonic, and Holy Spyro"
Doubter of Catholic orthodoxy or not, you must concede that the second statement is doctrinally false in a way that the first is not.
Moral statements are just as truth apt as the two above. Moral Antirealsm doesn't really challenge this. What it challenges are the truth-aptness of the moral frameworks under which moral claims may be true or false.
I think moral frameworks can be many things:
Useful, or useless.
Virtuous, or vicious.
Agreeable, or disagreeable.
Desirable, or undesirable.
But true or false? I don't think so. I just can't see how they are the sort of things that might be true or false.
I agree with this - and it seems to me that this exact thinking applies to moral statements. But I consider truth dependent on an object. If your object is “the world at large” I simply don’t understand what you think you’re saying wrt to a moral “fact” of the world.
But again; I may be (and this is active work(including this comment)) changing that conception as we exchange.
I think there are a number of problems with this post, but let me just focus on the most basic. As outlined by @Michael and others in the other thread (link), moral truth claims adhere to a basic sort of correspondence theory of truth. At least this is how I mean them. You are thinking in terms of a formal systems notion of truth. It’s an equivocation on what “truth” means. For example, we can call the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity a tautology (“truth” in the formal systems sense), but that is not how Catholics mean it. We do not mean, “If you accept our axioms then this follows tautologically.” We mean, “This is true, it correctly describes reality.” A moral claim works the same way. The claim is not, “If you accept my system then this follows,” but rather that the proposition itself is true (and if your system can’t handle it then you need an upgrade).
A system or context can condition the meaning of a proposition, but the proposition itself is ultimately true or false depending on how it comports with reality. The primary bearers of truth are therefore propositions, not systems.
Somewhere what I was trying to convey has passed over you, which is fine as I do that too sometimes, so I would like to clarify the points again.
My precise definition I am using of ‘moral realism’ is a thesis of the conjunction of three claims:
1. Moral judgments are propositional [moral cognitivism]; and
2. Moral judgments express something objective [moral objectivism]; and
3. There are some true moral judgments [moral non-nihilism].
This is reflected, upon doing a quick search (again), in every major definition I am seeing on google; but my favorite is https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/#CharMoraAntiReal:
Those three prongs are the exact same as mine, except stanford is defining it in terms of the converse position (viz., in terms of what counts as moral anti-realism instead of what counts as moral realism, if you negate each and swap the disjunction for conjunction then you end up with the definition of moral realism).
In terms of your summary of my definition:
I think that is a perfectly adequate, less precise, short-hand for it. By ‘moral’ language I do mean ‘subject-referencing normativity’ and by fact I am refering to a statement which agrees with reality with respect to what it purports about reality. Unless I am missing something about your definition here, then I don’t see any incoherence with me accepting this as a useful short-hand definition.
Likewise, saying, in short-hand, “that are objectively binding on all” is just to say that moral anti-realism denies #2. “binding on all” isn’t really necessary aspect of moral anti-realism, but it a meaningful distinction. Technically some prescriptive judgment could be subject-referencing in the sense that it binds to me but not you (theoretically) and that would be a moral fact; however, when talking generally, I would say the most meaningful convo is about ones which apply to all subjects/persons.
Your short-hand definition above that I agreed to was that a moral anti-realist rejects that they are objective. Likewise, I accepted that if by moral realism you mean a person who accepts #1 and #3, which precludes #2 which is required for it to be an objective moral value, then I am a moral realist. I am failing to see the confusion here.
Correct. I apologize.
No. Like I said, moral judgments are expression of subject beliefs and not beliefs about facts under moral subjectivism. You seem to be either misunderstanding or completely ignoring this point I keep making. There is nothing incoherent with saying “I believe you shouldn’t do X” and this is a belief which is an expression of what my psyche approves/disapproves of—not an expression of a belief about a fact-of-the-matter.
I doubt you even completely reject this idea either. Imagine I said “I believe that ice cream tastes absolutely delicious!”. Would you really be confused and say “Oh so you are affirming the fact that ice cream tastes absolutely delicious?”. That believe is the upshot of an approval by their psyche of the taste of ice cream: it is not fact that ice cream tastes really good.
The second thing I wanted to clarify is that you seem to think, as I noted before, that either (1) a taste which expresses a desire for other to have the same desire is impossible or/and (2) that a subjectively universalized goal is equivalent to an objectively universalized goal.
With respect to #1, I just find these to demonstrably exist. With respect to #2, I can subjectively want for everyone to abide by “one ought not do X”, and with it a sense of universalization, while not conceding that it is a fact that “one ought not do X”. I am not sure what the hiccup is here, but you seem to think that it is actually impossible to have a taste that others should have the taste to not do X without it being converted into an objective fact: I think this is just a misunderstanding.
Firstly, it isn’t immutable. I have the taste that everyone should not torture babies, and that could very well change (although I doubt it) in the future.
Secondly, it is not ‘universal’ in any objective sense. I subjectively commit myself to trying to universalize my goal.
Think of it this way. Imagine that we programmed an AI such that they had the sole goal all the time of trying to convince and ultimately stopping people from torturing babies. All else being equal, that people shouldn’t torture babies is not a fact, the AI just has this ingrained taste. Now, does this change the fact that this AI is trying to universalize their taste? Not at all. You seem to omit this option in your analysis.
Ultimately, if one believes that torturing babies is permissible then, relative to them, it is permissible. For me, it is impermissible.
Ultimately, I would say it changes with the individual, and inter-subjectivity flows from that; although they may impact each other (e.g., I may change my mind about torturing babies depending no the society I am in).
Hi Leontiskos, thanks for making this point, it is crucial. It is precisely here that I am an error theorist. People go around all the time making doctrinal claims as if they were correspondence to reality claims. Pick any ideology, religion, political system, etc., you want, and you will find people talking about it as if they were claiming things about reality. When in fact, they are making doctrinal claims about and within a certain framework of beliefs. This is in fact a basic cognitive error, and it is for the clarification of errors of this sort that philosophy exists in the first place.
Moral claims absolutely do not escape this, as much as it might hurt the feelings of those making them. Moral claims are simply impossible without a moral doctrine within which they exist. And this moral doctrine itself, unlike the claims made within it, is not truth apt.
The larger philosophical question is, what claims do escape this?
I wouldn't say I fail to comprehend morality. I see morality as a function of evolved cognitive biases which tend to make individuals function successfully in a social group, as the following video illustrates:
Like the angry monkey, we are biased towards judging things to be wrong and acting on such judgements. There is no need for a 'moral law' to explain such behavioral tendencies - just a history of evolution as social primates.
There is no inconsistency in social primates like us intellectually recognizing an emotivist basis for morality, and yet continuing to be social primates who form and act on moral judgements. Humans can't turn themselves into Vulcans just by adopting a particular moral theory.
I know your intuitions about morality have been strongly influenced by religious arguments. So it is understandable that it would be quite a paradigm shift for you to grasp such a different way of understanding morality, but I happen to think this is vastly more realistic than your belief in a moral law and lawgiver.
:up: Yessir.
Okay, that was a useful clarification. The thrust of my point is this: Why are you trying to universalize a taste that is not universal in any objective sense? If moral subjectivism is the claim that moral judgments are idiosyncratic (flowing from subjectivity), then the evangelistic moral subjectivist is attempting to impose idiosyncrasies.
Again, I think there is a relevant difference between ice cream preference and the belief that no one should torture babies. Imagine there were someone who went around, everywhere, trying to convince everyone that chocolate was the best ice cream, and if they saw anyone eating any other flavor they would violently prevent them from doing so. I ask them, "Do you think there is some objective reason everyone should only eat chocolate ice cream?" They respond, "No, it's my personal and subjective taste, but I just go around trying to persuade and even force everyone to eat only chocolate ice cream." And they take this to be a reasonable answer to my question. What would you say? Is that anywhere near reasonable? I think the proper word for such a person is "vain." They want everyone to have the same tastes that they do.
To be clear, I grant that your 'moral subjectivism' is probably not a form of moral realism, but I do not grant that it is coherent. It requires one to do things like impose idiosyncratic beliefs, or speak of judgments that are true and yet not objective.
I think you missed my entire point, because I agreed that doctrinal claims are "correspondence to reality" (truth) claims. I think you are putting the cart before the horse. Truth in the primary sense is not tautological, and systems are secondary realities. Propositions are primary. Everyday language is not a logical system. Analytic philosophers have basically built a pretty house and then pretended that there is no reality outside of it. Systems are contrived, not basic. Truth is a great deal more wild and unwieldy than the analytic philosopher's domesticated schema can account for.
So the category error is yours, for the truth-claim is not a system-claim. It is not a framework-claim. It is a metaphysical claim, and there is no contextualizing framework or system for truly metaphysical claims. Modern philosophy has dug itself into a rabbit hole by claiming that metaphysics and metaphysical claims are impossible.
Here is something I wrote elsewhere:
Else, take my post <here> and replace "theory" with "system" and "fact" with "proposition." The same point holds. There is no automatic rule that systems must be met with systems, or that systems are more fundamental than truths. I think it is quite the opposite.
(Of course there are exceptions, moral approaches which are system-fundamental. Utilitarianism comes to mind, where a systematic abstraction grounds the moral conclusions.)
Fair enough. I don't really know enough about your position to say much, and I may not have enough time for that anyway, but I suppose there is one thing that could be said. You distinguish the pragmatic from the moral (in law). Ross distinguishes the psychological from the moral. I think this sort of separation is part of the problem, and it comes from being in the shadow of deontologists like Kant.
Earlier I gave you an account of moral judgment, "To judge an action is to hold that it should have occurred or should not have occurred, with reference to the person acting." This can be pragmatic or psychological, but it is still moral. The whole purpose of law is moral, because it is meant to influence behavior.
Or in the other thread I spoke of the claim that "we should not torture babies." You replied:
Quoting AmadeusD
First, note that it is a principle of action. Now when a principle of action is applied, it becomes a norm. That is, the one applying it is utilizing it as a norm or standard, which is being applied to persons and their actions. So to say, "I think we should not torture babies, but I don't think it's a norm," is a contradiction (or else the English language is being used in a highly abnormal and unconventional manner). Else it is the claim that it is only a tentative norm or a watery norm. But just as tentative judgments are still judgments, so too are tentative norms still norms.
To be honest, then, I think the "moral subjectivist" lacks self-knowledge. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too, and this comes out in various ways. One such way is by applying or maintaining a principle of action and refusing to call it a norm. Another is vacillating on the question of whether they are within their rights to project their subjectivity onto others. The more precise problem, in my opinion, is that "subjective" and "objective" are much less precise words than the so-called "subjectivist" recognizes, and this leads to odd claims and presumptions.
Because it is a taste that I find is important enough to me to enforce. I totally agree with:
But, I would say, within my metaethical framework, the reason I agree with you is not because there is a fact of the matter: it is because what we both consider “worthy” of imposement is similar to one another. They are both tastes (to me), but one hits towards my core morals and the other seems negligible. Why? I can’t give you a full account of my psychology, but I would guess it is a bit of biology, sociology, nurture, and psychology that motivate me towards finding that a reasonable assessment.
Of course, you are going to disagree because all that matters to you, from your metaethical framework, is that they are both tastes; so why do I think you should somewhat agree with me here? Let’s go back to my example (that I still think you have avoided addressing): if you catch me in the act of torturing a baby (for fun) and tell me “you shouldn’t be doing that because it is a fact” and I say “I don’t care”...what is left for you to do other than shove your values down my throat (viz., other than for you to impose your taste that I should care about the moral facts because you care about the moral facts)?
This scenario explicates two things:
1. That moral realists cannot be coherent (internally) with the principle that a taste cannot be imposed on another because they equally do it all the time.
2. It is impossible not to impose one’s tastes, to some extent, on other people. It is not enough to note there is a moral fact-of-the-matter: you also have to impose your taste that anyone should care about them.
So I don’t think you should find it that controversial when I say I would impose my belief that one should not torture babies but no the vanilla ice cream because I value the former simply so much; just like how you value moral facts so much that you will impose that taste on other people.
You have yet to address this issue.
I would find them “unreasonable”, but not objectively wrong. ‘Unreasonablness’ is subjective (ultimately).
Not necessarily, but certainly a possibility. Most of the time moral judgments that are not peculiar to one individual makes it into society’s norms. The more peculiar, the less likely it is to have any power over the populace. Society’s functions on explicit and implicit agreement.
What is incoherent about any of that? Please explicate two propositions which I affirm that you find to be incoherent.
For example, I think you accept “one should not impose tastes on one another” and “one is permitted to impose tastes on each other if it matters deeply to them” which contradict each other; I would say you affirm this because you would implicitly shove your values about morals down my throat in the scenario I gave, which violates the first proposition. What similarly do you find incoherent with my view?
There being true moral judgments, in the sense of being true relative to whether it is a belief or conative disposition a subject has to an action, is perfectly coherent with them not being objective—if they are an upshot of our psychology, then why would anyone even think they are objective?
I half agree with you. A person's values might ultimately be a brute fact (as Hume attempted to demonstrate), and that determines what is good for them.
But the fact that different people have different values means that there is no point-of-view invariant value, as value depends on the point of view. Even if everyone has the same base set of values (if we go with Hume, avoidance of pain (broadly conceived) and pursuit of pleasure (again broadly conceived), the fact that one person's pleasures (bathing in asses milk) entailing another one's pain (slavery) renders an objective account inaccurate. Values can be real (in the sense of not fictions or illusions) and brute, while also being subjective, it seems to me. Unless 'real' is construed to mean 'point of view invariant' or even a view from nowhere. I haven't read the whole thread, sorry if this has been dealt with already.
I'm not sure what you mean here by "value". I am simply saying that moral realists believe that there is some X such that "one ought not X" is a brute fact.
Asking them to explain why it's the case that one ought not X is like asking the physicist why electrons are negatively charged particles. There's just no answer to this question.
I'm very sorry about how dismissive this might sound, but I can't think of anything but 'What, no".
That makes no sense to me. This requires that you apply that judgement to other people. I make no such step. I think it's probably better that other people don't routinely do that, but that's only a comment on my own discomfort. I say literally nothing, and claim literally nothing, about how others should behave. I have thoughts, sure, but I refuse to(tbh, am not motivated to either) conclude anything. I inform my own actions. No one else's. And i don't, unless by incident. I suppose one could say 'norm' OR 'norm for me'. And yeah, it's normal for me not to want to torture babies. That doesn't extend to anyone else (again, other than the fact that it actually is normal, rather than normative, to not do that).
Quoting Leontiskos
I just can't see an issue with this. If your principles are applied only to yourself, you are making no attempt whatsoever to enforce them. You are not making judgements or proclamations on actions per se, but on your actions. I think this is best encapsulated by an explanation i gave of why I'm not longer depressed to my wife (Lmao)
I just do not have time to second-guess everything i do. I accept i can't possibly know if an action is correct, right, or best. I can approximate, and forge on knowing full-well I could be incredibly wrong consequentially and will need to adjust my actions in future based on the results of actions in present. I do not judge the action as moral or immoral because i reject deontology almost entirely.
Physicists can empirically verify is (with reference to definition, sure). Moral facts are not amendable to the same verification. I think this is the trouble, though i agree that's how realists see their position.
Proving that something is the case isn't the same as proving why something is the case.
I'm saying that there is no explanation for why electrons are negatively charged, and that there is no explanation for why one ought not do something.
If all you want to say is that moral realists haven't proven that there is something that one ought not do then I won't object.
yeah, perhaps we've just misused terms (one or other of us) but i think this is what my issue boils down to. I can accept the 'brute fact' position because it requires no justification to take, but I see no reason to accept the claim (wrt morality, anyhow) I suppose. A further objection, but not relevant is that I just cannot see how a moral statement could be brute. Morality isn't inherent in anything but those statements.
Why?
I agree. People don't go around thinking they are making tautological claims. They generally think they are making claims about reality.
Which of these don't you agree with:
(By "Doctrine", I mean any doctrine, system of thought or belief, ideology, etc. )
Claims can be about doctrine, or about reality, or both.
Doctrinal truth is independent of truth in reality.
Claims can therefore be:
Doctrinally true, but false in reality.
Doctrinally false, but true in reality.
Doctrinally true or false, but have no truth value at all in reality.
Doctrinally empty, and true or false in reality.
The form in English of doctrinal and reality claims is identical.
Therefore, people are apt to get all this wrong. They may confuse doctrinal claims with claims about reality, or mistake doctrinal truth with truth in reality.
How does one discover and verify such brute facts?
(Sorry for butting in, feel free to quote if this has already been gone over, I certainly haven't read the whole thread)
Quoting Michael
Presumably you meant "...why there is something..."
If you agree that there is a relevant difference between ice cream preference and not wanting babies to be tortured, then what is the difference!? How does a taste become justifiably imposable? You claim they are exactly the same, and you treat them entirely different. You claim they are tastes, but you treat them as laws. This is irrationality at its finest.
Quoting Bob Ross
Nope. I say, "This is a moral truth [a "fact" if you prefer], and therefore I treat it as a moral truth." You say, "This is a taste, but I do not treat it as a taste." My action matches my perception, whereas yours does not. Even if someone wants to say that I am irrational (because they believe my perception is mistaken), they would have to admit that you are significantly more irrational, because you do not even act according to your perceptions. You have a sort of first-order irrationality going on.
Quoting Bob Ross
Good, and why are they unreasonable?
Quoting Bob Ross
It is irrational to impose tastes; it is irrational to hold that there are non-objective truths; it is irrational to treat two alike tastes entirely differently; it is irrational to claim that rationality is a subjective matter. Your thread is overflowing with irrationality. When faced with a contradiction in your thinking you try to defend it, and seven more pop up.
I addressed this in my post to you <here>. Judgments need not be enacted to occur. To judge that, "we should not torture babies," is to apply a norm to people. Even if it is not applied externally, you are still applying a norm in your judgment. If you do not apply norms to others, then you cannot agree with that claim. Instead you might say, "I should not torture babies, but this 'should' does not apply to others."
Quoting AmadeusD
Sure, but the claim involves the word 'we'. It's a rather important word within the proposition.
I don't make that claim. You seem to be replacing some of my terms to support your response.
i shouldn't torture babies.
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, that is exactly the case. I cannot see how this isn't clear in the post you've responded to. In any case, yes. That's right.
I already provided the quote where you agreed to the claim. Here it is again:
Quoting AmadeusD
I have clarified this multiple times, at much pain (linguistically). i think this. I don't think it about anyone else. The claim is only that it's not good to torture babies - not to whom that applies. Perhaps you're weighting your own wording heavier than I am.
In any case, I have clarified this enough for a lifetime. I do not make that claim. That was also a tongue-in-cheek response.
I make that claim one should not torture babies. But i am the only one. Can i be a moral anti-realist NOW?
Then you would not agree to the claim that "we should not..." 'We' = 'Myself and other people.' Like I've said all along, your claim contradicts your position.
But by all means retract the claim. I assume this is what you are now doing?
Not at all, no. But i am outlining that the claim was misconstrued, and that was likely my fault. I really don't care how we got here.
I am telling you I don't make that claim. Accept it or do not. I never made that claim. I may have misspoke.
We got here when you tried to agree to a commonsensical claim that we should not torture babies, and then I pointed out that the claim is inconsistent with your position, and now you've slowly and painfully walked it back. So now you agree with me: you do not hold that we should not torture babies, because your presuppositions do not allow it.
1. No. You took a tongue-in-cheek response a bit too seriously, because that response contained a total mis-step on my part. The claim was never made. I misspoke, tongue in cheek. And again, I don't care. That was my fault; sloppy interaction for sure and to a major fault. But hte fact is, that is not my claim, and wasn't my claim. This is why it's been painful. Not because i've had to slowly walk anything back. I entirely missed the part where i fucked up in my response - which does not reflect my claim.
2. I never did.
3. I'm feeling as if this has gone circle from being a bit adversarial, to pretty amicable, to now somewhat adversarial.
I fucked up. I apologise. That is not my claim. We good? hehe
Sure, fair enough. :up:
Nice, thank you mate. Really appreciate the grace. It's been a really cool thread.
Okay:
Quoting hypericin
Quoting hypericin
I tend to think you are digging around in the grave of Logical Positivism. I don't think people are often confused about this matter. It is only very seldom that we speak about doctrinal claims qua doctrinal. Do you have any examples:?
Quoting hypericin
For me the problem with this Logical Positivist-esque approach is that it reifies judgments and propositions. You are trying to read that as a material, intent-independent sentence, when in fact it is not. The material sense creates an ambiguity, but in the context of organic intent the meaning is, "According to the rules of chess, one cannot move pawns backwards." This is about the "doctrine" of chess, which is itself a part of reality; and it is true.
Edit: Changed comma to semicolon in last sentence.
I don't mind if you retract statements or mistakes, but it is worth noting that the point at hand was not insubstantial. You tried to affirm a moral claim while denying that it involves a norm. I pointed out that, in effect, moral claims involve norms. After that you saw that the norm was attached and backed away from the claim, due to the norm. The more fundamental point here is that moral claims and moral norms are all around us. Avoiding them would be like avoiding CO2 and only breathing oxygen. "We should not torture babies," is a moral claim, but so is, "He should not have cut me off in traffic." We are social creatures, and as such we are constantly judging actions.
*sigh*
I have no idea how to get this through to you lol - I misspoke. I walked nothing back. Given that I entirely overlooked where I misspoke you took my claim for something it wasn’t. I have no issue with this… I’m just being very clear to you that I fucked up in our exchange, but hold my position with no qualms.
There is a norm attached to making a moral claim about anyone but me. I never intended to intimate the claim was about anyone but me - which is where I fucked ip and have now multiple times apologies for that because it was my fault this was such an anal exchange. We weren’t talking about the same claim - because I messed up. Unsure what’s not clear about this
What does it mean for the rules of chess to be "true"? Can a games rules be "false"?
The rules exist. The may be followed, broken, or ignored. But how exactly are they "true"?
The truth in question was the claim, not the doctrine. "According to the rules of chess, one cannot move pawns backwards." Sorry - sloppy writing, I admit!
Well, if it was purely accidental then my point remains instructive. But we have been talking about the torture of babies for days now, and I would be surprised if you have consistently misunderstood that claim to be about only oneself, and not also about others.
Note that you had already staked out the same position earlier (). There you claimed that it was justifiable to get angry at others who behave in a way you deem incorrect. In that case it was also obvious that we were talking about the behavior of other people.
This is absolutely the case. And i've certainly learnt to be far more careful. I've cleaned a fair bit of egg from my face.
Quoting Leontiskos
Not really. I queried why it would be senseless. I can see where you've gone with that, though.
Quoting Leontiskos
In that case, yes, but for the above (in regard to your take on my position).
No, the point is that it is not about you. It's not personal. <This post> was meant to convey something other than personal culpability. I don't count it an error to claim that we should not torture babies. At worst it is an understandable mistake from a moral non-realist. But if it was a purely accidental utterance/agreement, then so be it.
Quoting AmadeusD
:up:
I have no idea why you're saying this.
I made an error of laziness by not reading adequately closely, the statement you made. Therefore, my response was incoherent in light of my actual position. There was no mistake in my claim(position, that is - I never intended for the claim you're talking about to be made from my mouth(to use metaphor)), there was a mistake in my words. Which is absolutely a personal mistake on my part for not reading adequately and responding hurriedly without considering the actual words used.
Like, dude, what's not getting over the line here?
Yet, the case is that i made a mistake in replying to fast. My position hasn't changed one iota. I'm really not understanding what you're not getting here... *shrug*.
IF nothing else, you're being wrong here is unhelpful to me because i now do not know if you intended the lesson that i've actually learned (to read more closely to ensure i don't represent a view i don't hold) or that you think I actually held a different view between the start and end of the substantive exchange?
Swell. Your zealous defense of your honor hath succeeded. I concede all points. I surrender. You win.
Now go do some actual philosophy.
I'm sorry, why are you being a dick?
I'm trying, very politely, to assist you to understand that I did not ever hold the view you're saying I had to walk back. That is the case. Why has this descended into you making insulting quips?
So then you agree, the rules of chess themselves cannot be "true".
What would it mean for the claim "You cannot move a pawn backward" to be true "in reality"?
Either, the claim would be true without the rules of chess. This is false.
Or, the rules of chess themselves would have to be true. This is nonsensical. (this is the case where you X'ed/?. How do you make the check/X icon, btw?).
The claim, therefore, "You cannot move a pawn backward", in reality, outside the rules of chess, is false or nonsensical.
Precisely the same holds of moral claims.
A moral claim C is true, or false, in virtue of moral rules, R. (doctrines, axioms, etc.)
What would it take for C to be true in reality?
Either, it is true without R. But we just said, C is true in virtue of R. This is therefore false.
Or, R itself is true. I contend, R can no more be true than the rules of chess. You can follow R, or not, like R, or not, find R useful, and virtuous, or not. But R by its nature, cannot be true, it is not truth-apt.
First, it seems that they do have truth value. So "one ought not kick puppies for fun" is a valuation. And it gives every appearance of being true. Therefore there are true valuations.
Second, if valuations are not the sort of thing that can be true, then they cannot be used in deductions or explanation. If "Banno likes Vanilla" is not true, then it cannot be used to explain why Banno usually buys vanilla ice cream and vanilla milkshakes. If "One ought not keep slaves" is neither true nor false, then it cannot be used to reach conclusions such as
And so on.
Even if the rules of chess cannot be true, it would not thereby follow that no rules or systems can be true. We are apt to speak about the truth of an artifact according to the goal of the artist. So if there is a horse drawing competition, the drawing that most resembles a real horse will be the winner, and will be deemed truest. Or a carpenter's square is true when it achieves an exact 90° angle. We could apply the same rule to games, and perhaps claim that the true game is chess and not checkers, because it better achieves the end that games are meant to achieve.
Quoting hypericin
(There might be a shortcut for the 'x'. I don't know.)
Quoting hypericin
This is really the whole of your argument, and it is nothing more than an assertion. Moreover, it is an assertion I have already addressed (). Feel free to engage that post.
Quoting hypericin
I think at bottom your claim is rather simpler. You are saying that all truth is formal, deriving from axioms, and where axioms are not truth-apt so conclusions are not truth-apt (in the strong sense). But the moral axioms you have in mind are qualitatively identical to the conclusions. For example, the Utilitarian begins by saying that one should achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and ends by saying that Bob should ride his bike to work instead of driving. At the end of the day you just think prescriptions cannot be true or false, no? It is not that R is systematic/doctrinal/axiomatic, but rather that it is prescriptive. If all you are saying is that prescriptions are not truth-apt, then all that talk about systems and axioms led me to misunderstand your position.
Do you think mundane claims are also true in virtue of systems, such as the claim, "Frogs can jump"?
Is the point here that you are perceiving truth in it, therefore it is a truth-evaluative statement? As my previous question, im not objecting, just want to clarify what you're saying.
I've no idea what that might mean.
...and what I said above applies here too. If the rules of chess are neither true nor false, then they cannot be used in deductions such as:
Is this what is being suggested? If the major premise is neither true nor false, no one can win.
You've claimed it 'gives every appearance' to have truth in it.
I disagree (but that's probably already known, and isn't too relevant here - it just explains why im asking).
You must be perceiving that status of 'being true' viz. it 'appears' to be true to you. I am asking whether your point is that your perception of it's truth is what grants its truth-evaluative power or whether you're trying to suggest you are merely making observation of it, grounded in something other than your perception.
Quoting Banno
Yes, this is interesting. I was just pulling an example that hypericin gave in the other thread (). I want to say that the case depends on a kind of material imprecision which prescinds from the intent/context of the statement. Your response to him in that thread was presumably to the effect that context is always at play, and that "context-independent" is a fiction. His point here, though, is that the rules taken as a whole, or the game taken as a whole, are apparently not truth-apt:
Quoting hypericin
It's moving towards conceiving of morality as a set of hypothetical imperatives.
So you think "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is neither true nor false? Or do you think it false?
Quoting Banno
What makes it true?
Quoting Banno
Its very easy to reason about normativity in terms of some kind of means-ends analysis.
Yes, I saw that. I can't see how one could play chess if he were right.
No. Asking you to clarify yourself
I see you’ve answered a question with a question. Neato
Well, "one ought not kick puppies for fun" will be true if and only if one ought not kick puppies for fun.
That's about all one can say, but I suspect you will not be happy with it. You probably want to ask how we know it is true, and my own answer is that it's a consequence of the hinge proposition that one ought so far as one can avoid causing suffering. And we "know" that to be true. With all the usual considerations invovled in hinge propositions.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Can you show how one does that if normative statements have no truth value?
I think he might say that a game like chess involves voluntarily abiding by stipulated rules, and that deductions can be formed in light of these stipulated rules, but the truth of the deductions is only derivative, deriving from an artificial reality (namely, the stipulated rules). It's the idea that there is chess-truth and there is real-truth, where the first depends on stipulated rules and the second does not. Thus claims about the rules of chess are truth-apt in light of the rules of chess, but the rules of chess taken as a whole are not truth-apt. He would say that, "Chess is true," and, "Chess is false," are nonsensical statements.
Quoting Banno
Again, that describes how people talk about truth but it doesn't in and of itself tell you if something is true or truthapt.
Quoting Banno
So what stops someone from starting from a different assumption about whether one ought to cause suffering? Presumably there is nothing that makes this true either if you have to add in that its a hinge proposition.
Quoting Banno
Its very easy, you can talk about it in terms of things like goals, actions, their consequences and reason using them instead. People do it every day concerning the things they want to do and the ends they want to realize to decide what behaviors they want to do.
This kind of stuff is difficult without being very precise but I think there is a good point in the idea of chess not being true or false due to how it is a construction. Its truth totally depends on people to the extent that it seems difficult for there to be truths that are not about things like people playing chess or their intentions regarding chess and things like that. Its difficult to say the rules of chess pick out anything independently of such things which makes it similar to morality in that regard. And there comes a triviality to it too because if you can talk about the rules of chess being true then it is trivial to talk about any game being true. Talking about this is interesting because it unveils that a lot of our truth talk is actually idealizations and when you try to specify what you mean, the original sentences seem at best vague, usually faulty and can arguably even not be true under the standards you would have wanted for them.
I can see how chess would be a useful example to hypericin's position. I think the problem is that chess is a voluntary activity, whereas morality is not ().
For example, you got out of bed this morning because you believed that the proposition, "I ought to get out of bed," was true. On my reckoning that is a moral judgment, pertaining to your own behavior. Is the reasoning that grounds that moral judgment purely hypothetical, with no reference to, or support from, objective values or 'oughts'? I really, really doubt it. When people make decisions they do so on the basis of the belief that some choices are truly better than others, in a way that goes beyond hypothetical imperatives. After all, in real life a hypothetical imperative needs to be grounded in a non-hypothetical decision or imperative in order to take flesh.
I suspect neither of our interlocutors have the background to follow this discussion.
Well, it was good enough for Tarski, Davidson and one or two others.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Nothing - any more than something stops someone from starting with g as 10m/s/s. Either way, they may find it difficult to maintain consistency. What makes it true that "g is 9.8m/s/s" is exactly that g is 9.8m/s/s.
Quoting Apustimelogist
How do you set out the "ends they want to realize " without an evaluation?
Quite right. Your post about chess-deductions made me thing of something similar, where any restrictions on the movement of the pawn depend on whether the pawn "counts as" a chess piece or just a piece of carved wood, and statements about chess pieces will have different truth conditions than statements about pieces of carved wood.
But if you and @hypericin engage one another on these points I will be interested to look on.
Just saw this...
You are just playing with words. This is not the same meaning as the "true" we are discussing.
Quoting Leontiskos
H If moral claims aren't true by virtue of moral rules/systems/etc, what are they true by virtue of? Is "one mustn't hurt cats" a brute fact, just as "one mustn't hurt dogs"? Or is there some rule they flow from?
And is everything that follows rules a tautology? The world, being orderly, must seem be a very tautological place to you.
Quoting Leontiskos
I never said that. Moral claims may indeed be true, but only in that they are true representations of the moral system within which they operate. Just as propositions about chess may be true representations of the rules of chess, or not.
Quoting Leontiskos
My point is to challenge the idea that
* people make moral propositional claims
- therefore
*moral propositional claims are truth-apt
- or
*everyone is running around making mistakes.
My argument is that there is a third way: people make propositional moral claims, but they are claims within systems of ideas, not claims about the world. And that you can make true or false, therefore truth-apt claims within systems of ideas which themselves may be true, false, not truth apt at all, or nonsensical.
The moral rules/systems I have in mind aren't necessarily prescriptions. They may be something like, "all sentient life has value". Indeed, I believe this. But, how do I know it? What tells me it is true? If it were false, how would I know it? How do I reality test it? How did I or anyone discover this fact? These are the questions that seem to bedevil any moral proposition, and it is in this sense that they aren't truth-apt: not only do we not know they are true, we don't even know what knowing they are true, or knowing they are false, looks like.
Propositions about the rules of chess may be true or false. The rules of chess may not be. Try harder.
Quoting Banno
:roll: Supercilious blowhard.
That is the key question that moral realists need to answer. Kant, for example, believed that this could be done using what he called pure practical reason, leading him to the categorical imperative.
Quoting hypericin
No, my point is that if moral facts are brute facts then there is no answer to the "why". But it is reasonable to ask the realist to prove "that" there are brute moral facts.
Nobody said moral statements aren't truth apt. The problem is that's doesn't lead to the moral realism as a conclusion if you're a deflationist.
My understanding of moral realism is that it is the theory that some moral propositions are true in such a way that if everyone believes that they are false then everyone is wrong.
Why can't a moral realist believe this and also be a deflationist?
A moral realist can believe that and be deflationist. The point is, she started out a moral realist. She did not arrive there by way of argumentation.
The argument in question (that moral statements are truth apt) just has no force to persuade. If you're a moral realist, it's probably because it fits your psychological makeup. There is no argument for it.
I'm not sure who would argue for the latter. Moral sentences being truth-apt also allows for error theory and moral subjectivism.
I'm also unsure of the relevance of being a deflationist. Even if one is a correspondence theorist or a coherence theorist it is still the case that moral sentences being truth-apt also allows for error theory and moral subjectivism.
I answered this in detail in my response, and you can even find it in the quotes you have of me in your response. I said that the difference is that I care about it enough to impose it on other people, just like how you care enough about upholding moral facts to force that value down my throat.
But I never said this. I would strongly urge you, with all due respect, to read my responses more carefully. I elaborated in detail how they are both tastes and are not different with regards to that...but whether it is considered ‘reasonable’ to impose is going to depend, since it is subjective, on how much the person cares about it—and I gave the analogy in axiology that commits you to the same line of thinking.
If by ‘law’ you mean ‘moral facts’, then you have simply misapprehended everything I have proposed so far. If by ‘law’ you just mean a ‘subjective moral judgment that commits the person to trying to universalize a desire’, then obviously I agree with that. However, the irrationality you refer to only holds water if you are speaking about ‘law’ in the former sense, not the latter.
Onto the irrationality:
Why? What’s irrational about it? Show me a contradiction, whether that be logical, actual, or metaphysical. I don’t think you can: you just projecting your sentiment that we shouldn’t impose tastes as if it ‘irrational’.
Likewise, you refuse to respond to my hypothetical that I have presented now multiple times and I am starting to think you may realize it undermines your point here; otherwise, I don’t know why you keep evading it. Respond to the hypothetical.
I never made this claim. Again, I think a lot of this is just misunderstandings on your side, and perhaps I am just not conveying it good enough: it is a fact that I believe, I disapprove, of torturing babies, but that is not a moral fact. The moral judgment is enveloped in the belief, which is an upshot of my psychology and physiology, that is a projection my thinking and not something which latches onto a fact about the world. You seem to be thinking that I am saying that if I believe that one shouldn’t torture babies that it is true: this is ambiguous: it is not true that ‘one should not torture babies’ because it is it true that ‘I believe one should not torture babies’. There is no truth of the matter about ‘one should not torture babies’, since there is no fact of the matter. But it is entirely possible for “I believe ...” to be true for me and false for you since it is an indexical statement. So where’s the irrationality in this? Show me a contradiction.
Sort of true. If they are identical, then sure I agree. But they aren’t. You are assuming we should treat them the same because they are within the same category, but that doesn’t make them identical. I care much more for one taste than another, then it rationally makes sense to prioritize the former over the latter. Show me the contradiction.
What makes something rational is not subjective in the sense that we get to make them up. What is ‘rational’ is tied to epistemology, which is operated under the context of ‘if one wants to know the world, then they should...’ (type hypothetical imperatives) and, thusly, within that context there are objectively better ways to know the world and, extensionally, better ways to be rational. I never claimed that the term ‘rationality’ was grounded in subjectivity: I think that it is, more or less, about ‘aligning oneself with reality in thought and action’.
You have not come up with a single valid contradiction yet. Give me two propositions which I affirm and demonstrate the contradiction or incoherence with them.
Moral statements being truth apt doesn't entail moral realism. If I hold that the truth predicate merely serves a social function, I can accept the truth aptness of moral oughts without any metaphysical implications. I may also reject scrutability of reference, so I don't think "ought" refers any more than any other word. This doesn't interfere with truth aptness.
But then it is no longer a brute fact, no? The categorical imperative explains why one ought not to X. Or are you saying the categorical imperative itself is the brute fact, for Kant.
Generally not. "I ought to get out of bed because otherwise I will be late for work" is not a moral judgement, it is purely pragmatic. Only something like "I ought to get out of bed because I shouldn't be lazy" approaches a moral claim.
I don't follow your point. Making moral claims seems voluntary, one is under no obligation to make them. And I don't see why voluntary/necessary is an important distinction in this discussion.
Yes.
Quoting frank
I agree with that. It could be that error theory or moral subjectivism are correct.
Or even moral nihilism.
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, I would call it a normative judgement rather than moral judgement, but maybe thats a tangential point.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't agree. "I ought to get out of bed" is not independent of the context. Sure, you can incorporate the context and say "I ought to get out of bed in x context" but then that leads me to ask why I ought to get out of bed in x context. I don't see how such a reason cannot depend on my personal desires and personal goals.
I will then end up asking the question: "why ought I perform behaviors that fulfil my goals?". I see no putatively objective statement about the world that makes it true that "I ought to fulfil my goals". I may want to fulfil my goals but I don't see why that means I ought to behave in accordance to what I want. Yes, it may seem a little strange or irrational (to most people) if I don't act in accordance to my own goals but I don't see why those consequences mean I ought to fulfil my goals. So what if it is strange or seems to be irrational to others? Attempts to establish why I shouldn't behave irrationally just seem to appeal to the same kinds of normative statement at the beginning of this paragraph: " I ought to fulfil my goals" or "I ought to do what I want".
Just giving such normative statements as a brute fact doesn't seem good enough justificafion for me because there is nothing stopping someone from starting from different assumptions and believing a different kind of contradictory normative fact. Neither is there any fact of the world that will distinguisg which of the contradictory normative facts are actually true. It seems to come down to subjective intution and my views of neuroscience and cognition do not give me any reason to believe that such subjective intuitions have any link to some objective reality in regard to normative oughts.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't doubt this since there are many examples of these people in these threads but I think thats beside the point. Someone believing that one is performing choices that are objectively good or bad doesn't give necessarily give me reason to think those beliefs are in some sense veridical, especially when some people might not share those beliefs. When I try to directly examine reasons for there to ve objective oughts as I have just done in the last section, I do not come up with any reason that they actually exist.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am not totally sure what you mean here but I am guessing you mean that these imperatives need to be grounded in the kinds of prior assumptions like "I ought to fulfil my goals" which I could not find any objective basis for in a previous section of this post.
Probably far too liberal useage of italics in this post, unfortunately.
Or there could be no such true brute facts such as the categorical imperative. Or, such ultimate moral propositions may not be truth-apt, while everyday moral claims, being claims about such ultimate propositions, are perfectly truth apt.
That is error theory?
That would be moral subjectivism?
Although I would argue against moral subjectivism on the grounds that when we make moral claims we don't usually think of ourselves to be just expressing a subjective opinion. This is why there is such a strong disagreement. When I say that X is good and you say that X is bad, you don't tell me that it might be good for me; you tell me that I'm wrong.
Rightly or wrongly we mean to assert an objective moral fact, and as such it must be that either moral realism or error theory is correct.
Oh, I guess you're right. Error theory is that all talk of moral realism is in error, right?
:ok:
Well every single opinion is good enough for someone even if has valid criticisns so I don't really see what this statement contributes any defence.
Quoting Banno
Well then you have not given an argument. Giving an argument would be giving me some evidence that "g is 9.8m/s/s" or the equivalent for some moral statement.
Quoting Banno
I assume by this you mean that statements like "Banno likes Vanilla" supposedly cannot be true.
"Banno likes vanilla" is very different from "Banno ought to eat vanilla" though. "Banno likes vanilla" is not a normative statement, it is a fact about states of the world insofar as you are a component of the world and "liking" is a state of your being. There is nothing wrong with that.
At the same time, I don't see why people can't reason using normative statements even if those statements don't necessarily have objective truth values. I don't see why the fact that I can reason with them implies objective truth, similarly to rules in chess.
There is a difference. Suppose that Kant was ultimately successful and the categorical imperative was the moral lodestone of the world. Everyday moral claims would seem to be truth-apt, and indeed they would be, as they would either follow from the categorical imperative, or not. And yet, it still may be the categorical imperative itself is false, or not truth apt. And indeed any such "brute moral fact" might necessarily be false, or not truth apt.
If it’s false then it’s not a brute fact. If it’s a brute fact then it’s true.
Call it a "brute proposition", then.
The point is that everyday moral propositions seeming to be truth apt carries no evidentiary weight whatsoever. They may be perfectly truth apt, and even true, in that they perfectly follow from say the categorical imperatives.
I made the earlier comparison to Catholic doctrine. Statements about Catholic doctrine seem to be truth apt, and they certainly are, in that they are doctrinally correct, or not. At the same time, you might believe that Catholic doctrine itself is false, necessarily false, or just not truth apt.
I think possibly one issue in this whole discussion is that both you and Banno want to argue for being able to say "x is true" or "x is false", yet neither of you are willing or able to give arguments that refute the kinds of indeterminacy as in these examples with chess pieces.
Quoting frank
:up: :ok: :cheer: :up:
Quoting Michael
I think I personally lean towards views where there is skepticism about this. It may at least be indeterminate or context dependent.
Quoting hypericin
Hypericin, I hope to respond to your posts tomorrow, but let me ask a preliminary question. You have given an argument against the truth of moral claims, such that,
Do you have examples of non-moral truth claims that are true in a supra-systematic way? Is any system true or false? Does your argument prove too much? Namely, that truth itself is always system-constrained? (This is the question that my initial responses have addressed.)
Quoting hypericin
See:
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting FIDE Laws of Chess
Is "The player with the white pieces commences the game" true, false, or not truth apt? Or are you going to claim that "The player with the white pieces commences the game" is a proposition about the rules of chess, not a rule of chess?
It's true, because if it were not, we could not form an argument such as
This thread has degenerated to imbecility. Have fun. :roll:
Quoting Banno
It is true of chess. It is part of the definition of chess. But there is no sense that it is true beyond chess. Outside of chess it is false, or nonsensical/ not truth apt .
The rules of chess are not inherently propositional, though you can communicate them propositionally. You can also learn them by watching people play. Computers play perfect , rule abiding chess, knowing nothing of propositions. There the logic of the rules is encoded non-propositionally.
Are you pretending that propositions about X are the same as X?
"Moby Dick is an American novel consisting of the text 'Call me Ishmael. Some years ago...' "
Is a true proposition about Moby Dick. Moby Dick itself is neither true nor false, it is not truth apt.
Quoting Banno
Ok dude see ya
Fair enough.
Mundane claims: It would be too much of a stretch to claim that "I have an apple in my pocket" depends on this or that system. For our purpose lets say these are system-free claims.
Scientific claims: While this is apparently controversial, I think scientific claims offer a reasonable model of what systematic claims, where the system itself is true or truth-apt, can look like. Suppose I make a claim, say a calculation, that falls under the province of special relativity. That calculation may be true or false according to the systematic rules of special relativity. These systematic rules themselves may be true or false, to the degree that they accurately predict all the parts of empirical reality that they ought to.
Quoting Leontiskos
So a surgeon learning how she ought and ought not to wield a knife, is learning "morality"? This is not the "morality" I am familiar with.
Every "should", "ought", and value proposition, may be perfectly truth-apt, but it must explicitly or implicitly include an "according to" clause, just to be structurally correct. Because "according to" is a part of the notion of ought or values. There is just no such thing as an imperative or value according to nothing.
But an "ultimate" should, ought, or value proposition necessarily lacks an "according to", because it is ultimate. Therefore, it is necessarily ill-formed, and so is not truth-apt.
"According to Sam, ham tastes better than chicken": truth apt.
"(According to me) Ham tastes better than chicken": implicit according to, perfectly truth apt.
"Ham objectively and absolutely tastes better than chicken": taste is subjective and provisional by nature, the statement is internally contradictory and therefore not truth-apt. Or, self-falsifying.
@Leontiskos
@Michael
Well that’s just where moral realists disagree.
I wouldn’t say that it’s internally contradictory, just that it’s factually incorrect.
A good example is that of colour. It’s not internally contradictory to claim that grass is objectively and absolutely green, but given that I’m not a colour realist I would argue that this is factually incorrect. Colour is “in the head” (like taste). Obviously colour realists argue otherwise.
The same disagreement applies in meta ethics. Moral realism may be factually incorrect, but I don’t think it’s internally contradictory.
:chin:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Okay. Well the first thing I want to say is that your system/claim distinction is somewhat arbitrary. For example, you say that Kant's categorical imperative explains why something is the case, and therefore the categorical imperative is the brute fact, not the prescription. This is fine as far as it goes, but I think it is wrong to go a step further and claim that explanation implies a system. All claims, including moral claims, depend on a categorical premise, but it does not follow that all claims are system-based. Your claim here is similar:
More generally, arguments for moral antirealism in our scientific age usually take the following form:
More precisely, it is the idea that there is not parity between moral epistemology and the epistemology of natural science, and that only the latter is legitimate. I usually point out that the non-parity claim is false, or at least it is not supportable on my interlocutor's framework. This theme recurs in our conversation. Presumably you would say that the claim about the apple is system-free but the claim about the innocent man is not system-free. @Michael has done a good job laying the groundwork in this thread and the other thread regarding things like brute facts and @Bob Ross's "(moral) facts."
Quoting hypericin
Okay, but I think it is somewhat confusing to call that which follows from a system "true." It is simply not the case that things are true insofar as they follow from any arbitrary system. In effect you are offering a false concession to moral realism with this sense of "true."
Quoting hypericin
Yes, exactly. You are familiar with a Kantian morality, of (exceptionless) categorical imperatives, no?
---
Quoting hypericin
I agree with .
---
Quoting hypericin
The simpler point is that everyone on this forum did get out of bed this morning, therefore everyone on this forum does make moral claims or judgments. The same is not true of chess. Presumably we do not all play chess. So I reject the notion that anyone, practically, does not engage in moral judgment.
---
Quoting hypericin
Well, what is the notion of "true" that we are discussing? You have never defined it.
Quoting hypericin
If "One musn't hurt cats," is a system-based claim, then so is, "There is an apple in my pocket."
Quoting hypericin
I think anyone who claims that those who intend to make a truth claim are not doing so has a very odd notion of truth, propositionality, and intention. The claim that most everyone, including some of the most competent philosophers who have ever lived, have been plagued by first-order deception at the level of their very intention, is just a weak theory. It reads like a conspiracy theory. I'm not even sure it is coherent to claim that one can be deceived about their intention. (@Michael has also covered this topic in various ways.)
Quoting hypericin
As @Michael pointed out, I think this is a separate consideration. I claimed that it deserves its own thread (). But as I pointed out to you early on, discursive reason/justification must end at some point. The same holds of the epistemology of natural science.
Quoting hypericin
What does it mean to say, "I believe this," other than, "I believe this to be true"?
Well, that's because nobody gets out of bed "because I ought to fulfill my goals." You are floundering in abstractions. People get out of bed because "otherwise I will be late for work" (). People don't want to be late for work because they don't want to lose their job. They don't want to lose their job because they have children to feed, and here we arrive at a more basic moral judgment: "I ought to feed my children." This is one example of a personal goal that is widely accepted to be "moral," and so your "personal goal" distinction turns out to be no more relevant than the pragmatic or psychological distinctions that others have given. There is no mutual exclusion, here.
So if, "I ought to get out of bed," is grounded in the belief that one ought to feed their children, and the actor takes this belief to be objectively true (and moral), then, "I ought to get out of bed," is also objectively true and moral.
So again:
Quoting Leontiskos
The basis belief is, "I ought to feed my children," or, "It is better that I feed my children than that I not feed my children." I take it that this is an objective moral truth, but more importantly, it is affirmed to be an objective moral truth by the hundreds of millions of parents who got out of bed this morning.
How does caring about a taste make it imposable? This makes zero sense. There are people in this thread making real arguments, so this conversation is liable to get short shrift. If your only argument is, "My tastes are imposable because I care about them a lot!," then I am going to end this conversation. I am not going to argue with someone who thinks the burden is on me to show that de gustibus non est disputandum. As far as I am concerned such a move is a forfeiture of your position. I have never heard anyone, on this forum or elsewhere, argue for this stupid position. :groan:
(It's actually sort of fascinating because you have basically provided a per se description of irrationality or <"stupidity">. "I care, therefore I am justified. My passions justify me." It is truth or imposition by sheer willpower. This is precisely what irrationality is on a classical Platonic account. It is caring more about your passions than about what is true, and letting your passions override reason. The fellow I described <here> is at least rational.)
Quoting Bob Ross
I answered your tu quoque:
Quoting Leontiskos
So in a world without minds, would a complete taxonomy of this world included oughts and values?
No, because moral claims are about the behavior of "minds" (to use your word). Similarly, a world without traffic would have no traffic laws.
Oh? I thought you just clarified a few days ago that claims about chess, the most arbitrary sort of system, were true?
Quoting Leontiskos
They are not alike. The truth of the apple claim depends on knowing what the words mean, and access to my pocket. Sure, language is a system, but not the sort we are discussing here. Every proposition depends on language, so considering it as a "system" akin to a moral system just confuses the discussion.
"Do not execute that innocent man" is a command, and has no truth value. Consider rather "Innocent men ought not be executed". I know what the words mean. But to know whether it is true, I have to know: According to whom, or what? Without the implicit moral system which makes the sentence seem obvious to us, it is no more comprehensible than "Innocent eggplants ought not to be eaten." Why not? I'm hungry.
Quoting Leontiskos
Stop right there. We cannot expect a productive discussion if you abuse language that way. You cannot presume your own eccentric usage will be adopted by anyone else, offhand reference to the categorical imperative, or no. Moral claims, commonly understood, are about moral right and wrong. Not about surgical technique. Not generally about getting out of bed. The word "ought" is not sufficient to make a claim moral. We're not discussing claims such as "I ought to get two cheeseburgers today".
Quoting Leontiskos
When people make moral claims, these are truth claims about actions or characters, whose truthmakers are the systems of moral values they grew up immersed in, or adoped, systems likely shared by their moral community. For most people, this is enough. Values are real, but they are mind dependent, and they cannot be true independently of those who hold them.
It is no conspiracy to point out people mistake their values for reality. It is the same error, the same parochialism that regards one's own culture as "true" and absolutely "real". Cultures are real, their artifacts are physically real, but cultures, like values (which are culturally bound) are not mind independent, and are not "true" in an absolute sense.
Quoting Leontiskos
There is no limit in principle where scientific explanation ends. Researchers push it as far as they can take it. By contrast, it's frankly quite pathetic to throw up one's hands at "mustn't hurt kitties".
Quoting Leontiskos
"True" as in factual. Not likeness. Not the alignment of wheels.
Quoting Leontiskos
Presumably if traffic laws were "brute facts" they would exist with or without traffic.
In the counterfactual sense that "if there were minds then those minds ought not..." would be true.
Much like the counterfactual sentence "if the Tyrannosaurus rex still lived then it would be the largest living land animal on Earth" is true.
There can be objective truths about things that don't exist.
Well they evidently do because you go on to list all the sorts of goals or reasons why people get out of bed, and the other goals and reasons these are related to. Whether explicitly or implicitly, people seem to do things in order to avoid or attain future states of the world. Its very difficult to give a reason why people shpuld get out of bed that does not satisfy something like that, and ultimately it will be trivially related to the person's unique life situation.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am not making a mutually exclusive distinction. Feeding your children is yet another goal or desire or want or [equivalent pragmatic phrase] that people may have. It may happen to be widely agreed moral statement but that is irrelevant. On one hand, there is no requirement that the reasons for getting out of bed need to be moral. On the other, moral statements fall to the exact same line of reasoning I gave in that post: I cannot find objective reasons why I ought to feed my children. I may come upon a very good reason about not inflicting suffering on people but then you can ask if that is an objective reason. Is there an objective reason to not inflict suffering? What in the world would make it so?
Quoting Leontiskos
That someone takes a belief to be objectively true is not an argument that it is objectively true. Unless you can provide an objective argument why they are correct, then the only argument being given is someone's subjective inclination that they think something is true. Is there a reason to think those inclinations are accurate? How do you refute other people who just happen to have different inclinations? It is not a sound argument for something being objectively true. And this comes back to a point I made before: you and Banno seem to be primarily arguing for being able to use the world "true". But this is almost trivial and not the real meat of issues in regard to moral realism. As some other posters have said, moral realism doesn't follow from truth aptness. What you need to do is resolve the indeterminacy problem and show why some moral statements are objectively true, as opposed to just saying that is reasonable to use the word "true".
Quoting Leontiskos
Well, I don't think we can necessarily make the claim that it is affirmed as an objective moral truth by millions of people without some kind of rigorous empirical survey.
More importantly, I don't think the fact that people agree on things make them true. Often people agree on things by consensus which we later change our agreement to be false or which another completely different community think are false. It is plausible there are other reasons people agree which are not to do with objective truth.
As an example, it is trivial that the reasons people get out of bed are related to their unique personal situations, not some context-invariant reason. It just so happens that many people have similar reasons for getting out of the bed because we live in similar worlds culturally and we have similar desires, partly due to culture, partly due to biology (e.g. the only reason I want to eat is because I am biologically wired and structured to so so).
Whilst many people share similarities in why they get out of bed, many people have completely different reasons (e.g. not all have children to feed) and changing the proportions of people that have particular reasons is something that can conceivably occur by changing the social or even biological context. At the same timev someone having a goal that they may want to attain by getting out of bed doesn't seem to connect to some objective reason that they ought to get out of bed.
I can reiterate this line of thought in a similar way but concerning morality and agreement. People may agree on different moral things depending on the social context. Perhaps societies which are more harsh may have more permissive moral norms, societies which are more co-operative may have more stringent ones. Changing the context may lead to changes in moral norms due to the changes in the practicalities of living and changes in the way people interact or communicates with each other.
Our biological similarities obviously also have a big factor in morality - we are essentially wired to be averse to pain and we have sophisticated abilitied to empathize and read people's intentions. I don't need to refer to objective moral facts to explain that those kinds of things may lead to certain agreements on moral statements. In fact, if moral statements are about how people should behave and society relies on co-ordinated behavior to function, then it is almost impossible for society to function without wide ranging agreements on many things, whether legally or morally or otherwise.
Furthermore, I think that appealing to agreement among people suggests that they have some kind of inherent ability to sense moral truths. I just cannot envision this as some kind of likely ability for people to have, based on what we know about neuroscience and things like that. The way I conceive of neuroscience just doesn't look like we have some access to moral truths in some fashion. I cannot envision how that would look scientifically. We don't have some kind of sensory apparatus for moral truth and the idea of physically sensing an ought makes no sense to me.
To me, from a neuroscientific perspective, *I would say that* morals arise as abstractions which are related to things like desires and the kinds of affective and interoceptive states that underlie emotion. It doesn't seem to me that these have anything to do with some kind of moral objective state of affairs as opposed to our inherent biological tendencies and how they interact and manifest within a social context that can vary. Neither do I see any inherent reason why acting in accordance to those kinds of things is something we objectively ought to do, and I think that trying to charactetize moral truth that way is ultimately intractable, indeterminate and trivial.
But this is merely a logical relationship.
Tyrannosaurus rex were the largest living land animals to ever exist.
Therefore, if the Tyrannosaurus rex still lived then it would be the largest living land animal on Earth.
But moral facts, to you, are special "brute facts" which cannot be derived logically. Can you name any other such brute fact about something that doesn't exist?
1 + 1 = 2.
I don’t think you are being charitable to my position nor are you genuinely trying to understand it. You keep making hateful comments which are either ungrounded or presuppose your moral realist framework.
If you are unwilling to have a serious and respectful conversation about moral subjectivism, then I think it is best that we just agree to disagree. I am more than willing to continue the conversation, but, as of now, it seems clear to me you are more interesting with throwing around insults than actually contending with my elaborate responses. I responded to a lot of your objections and you simply ignored them in this response.
With that being said, I will address only the parts of your response that I think I wouldn’t be re-iterating what you have ignored from my other responses.
I do not disagree that tastes, at the end of the day, are indisputable. I never said otherwise or to the contrary.
You not liking my position is not a forfeiture of my position. If you can provide a contradiction or incoherence with the view, which you have not done as of yet, then I am more than happy to concede my position (or amend as necessary). I am not looking to stay ten toes down for the sake of dignity or pride: I seek the truth.
I am not really that interested in the definition of stupidity, since it hinges on the definition of rationality; so let’s dive in: what is your definition of rationality? I don’t see how enforcing a preference is irrational there is something incoherent or contradictory about doing so. This is why I keep asking you to provide two propositions that I accept which you think are incoherent or contradictory. I can only assume, with all due respect, that you are unable to do so, and implicitly concede that there isn’t any.
You would be right if moral facts existed. Again, you just continue to, with all due respect, blatantly presuppose your position and act like I am irrational for not accepting it. If there are no moral facts, then to impose a moral non-fact is not going against what is true. Likewise, in my scenario I gave you, not caring about the moral fact isn’t the same as claiming the moral fact is false or doesn’t exist.
You seem to smuggling here: treating a moral truth ‘like it is a moral truth’ seems to be smuggling in the notion that it intrinsically axiologically matters, which is false. Is that what you are arguing? That in virtue of something being a moral truth is should be valued?
If so, then how is that not stemming from a preference that you have? You can’t appeal to another moral fact because that is circular logic. Something being morally true doesn’t mean you have to value moral facts in general: what fact are they getting wrong? Or are you saying morals and axiology are the same thing under your view?
In a universe consisting of nothing, would 1 + 1 = 2? It would not be empirically verifiable. It would not be intuitively obvious, since the notion of any one thing would be incomprehensible, assuming there was anything around to have notions.
I got the feeling this wasn't on the menu, for this interlocutor. I have a feeling moral realists are necessarily unable to bridge the gap we're genuinely looking to traverse.
You're not following. A chess claim is true, but not because it follows from an arbitrary system.
Quoting hypericin
And without the taxonomical system that makes the apple sentence seem obvious to us, it is no more comprehensible than, "Bloofas are common in ariondus." Your notion of a "system" is arbitrary, and it is supporting your question-begging.
Quoting hypericin
Oh, I gave my definition of a moral judgment (). I noted that I hold to a correspondence theory of truth. You are the one running around making wild assertions without defining your terms. You say that I am not talking about truth, but you won't define what you mean by truth. You say that I am not talking about morality, but you won't define what you mean by morality. "Moral claims... are about moral right and wrong," is about as helpful and substantial as, "'True' as in factual."
Quoting hypericin
It is a conspiracy to hold that moral philosophers who understand the various positions are doing such a thing. But hey, you're probably just laboring under your parochialism, right? You've grown up in a culture of moral anti-realism, and you aren't able to understand that your moral claims are supra-systematic. You intend to assert that your moral claims are system-bound, but you are unable to understand that your intention is actually supra-systematic. How's that sound?
Quoting hypericin
Arguendo, why can't the same hold of morality? Again, your non-parity continues to struggle. One could attempt to answer the question, "Why are electrons negatively charged?," but the attempt is only worthwhile if the interlocutor accepts that, in practice, there is a limit to explanation. Once it is recognized that the interlocutor will not admit this (and is not therefore not being serious), one will not attempt an answer.
Quoting hypericin
"Factual"! :groan: Heaven help us! If you had read either of the current threads on this topic, you would know how question-begging this response is. In any case, it's nowhere near a philosophical account of truth.
Quoting hypericin
It depends on how one conceives of a brute fact. Michael's counterfactual point of course holds, but the problem is that, like Bob Ross, you are just begging the question. "Truth" is "factual," and "factual," among other things, means, "Non-moral." "Brute facts" can only be supported by the physical or natural world, and are therefore non-moral (i.e. they cannot be supported by truthmakers or states of affairs that are non-physical).
The difficulty for me is that you guys don't even understand that you are begging the question. You're blinkered in your own worldview, unable to see a different view. You also aren't able to see how inconsistent your arguments are. I haven't published a thread on morality because there are so many naive moral anti-realists here. I don't want to wade through all of those responses, especially if there is no one who is able to provide a response from the perspective of critical moral anti-realism.
I think your toes are much stickier than you realize. If someone thinks imposing tastes is justifiable, then in my estimation the conversation is at an end, and they have reduced their own position to absurdity. You think imposing tastes is justifiable (when "[You] care about it enough to impose it on other people"). Hence, the conversation is at an end.
Also, I am going to go ahead and report you to the logic police!
Yes.
Quoting hypericin
Does that matter? Does something need to be empirically verifiable for it to be true? Are you an antirealist about truth in general?
The philosophical one is. Having not resolved anything hehe.
But there's much to be said about that assertion.
No, I don't think I am. But it is an awfully weak "axiom" that is neither empirically testable nor intuitively clear. I suppose something can be true in spite of these lacks, though one would never learn of it. But in this case, the question is "true of what"?
It's pretty rare for someone who is deeply committed to some position to reverse themselves in a short time, such as the lifespan of a thread. In this thread I'd say we see a large number of failed attempts to establish moral anti-realism, and a large number of failed attempts to overthrow moral realism. Just consider the number of times the OP was revised, or the number of times arguments backtracked. Again, what inevitably happens in these threads is that a naive epistemology derides moral realism; the complex and non-empirical nature of epistemology is demonstrated; and then the naive epistemology recognizes that it is naive, and begins to back off.
In the intractable world of argument, I would call this a success. I wouldn't aim for more in a thread like this. The doubling-down on something which is commonly accepted to be absurd (that tastes are a proper subject of dispute) is a bonus, and is a strong sign of the weakness of the position. It seems like a successful thread to me.
From Bob and I's perspective, the exact opposite is true.
That's kind of the entire point of our lines of questioning. Nothing, whatsoever, has been presented to support moral realism. The closest anyone has got is Banno's weirdo move of just claiming 'brute fact' without anything whatsoever to establish that claim.
You've not done anything more. Sorry to say. But this is the nature or differing perspectives. I just can't grasp why anyone is being a dick about it (Banno's obtuseness mainly, but you've devolved a couple of times too).
Oh, really?
Quoting Bob Ross
adjust one's position for new objections isn't a failure, nor is refining ones position or language. Neither of us have ceded the ground of anti-realism. We've just come up against the same problem with new words or objections every time - but the problem amounts to just saying 'It's true, give up'.
If you don't think moral anti-realism lost the day in this thread, then you simply don't understand the OP or the purpose of this thread.
Or, and forgive me for this, you're wrong.
In either case, it appears you've made your conclusions and that's fine :)
Although I don’t want to overgeneralize moral realists, I would say my conversation with Leontiskos is an example of a moral realist that cannot step outside of their moral realism to understand their opposition on their opposition’s own terms. I don’t expect them to agree with me, but it is sad (to me) when the conversation isn’t as fruitful as it could have been.
Then please respond adequately to my previous responses, and demonstrate any incoherencies or inconsistencies with my position.
I see. So, for you, anyone who isn’t a moral realism is thereby absurd, irrational, and stupid...this seems like you have straw manned your opponent’s position(s) with a false dilemma.
Likewise, you ignored my questions about axiology. It seems as though you either reduce axiology to morality (which I think is flawed) or you are internally incoherent with this critique.
So be it.
I largely agree with Amadeus' analysis here. @Bannos moral realism seems like it is really just moral cognitivism, and I think they actually agree with me on that (but I could be mistaken).
Although I gave up on my original Humean argument for moral realism, this does not entail that I am convinced that moral realism is true nor that it should be the default position: quite the contrary; and I am sure Leontiskos didn't provide a positive argument for moral realism in here because they are expected me to give a positive argument for moral anti-realism in this thread (which is fair enough) but I've moved on and am now, in the other thread, asking moral realists to give me reasons to believe their view. With that being said, I am working on an argument for moral anti-realism that I have run by Leontiskos before; but here's the fully fleshed out version:
My argument provides a positive case against prong-2 of the moral realist thesis, so let me recap what I think that thesis is:
1. Moral judgments are propositional [moral cognitivism]; and
2. Moral judgments express something objective [moral objectivism]; and
3. There is at least one true moral judgment [moral non-nihilism].
Here's the argument:
P1: The way reality is does not entail how it ought to be.
P2: Moral facts are statements about how reality is such that it informs us how it ought to be.
C: Therefore, moral facts cannot exist.
Here's an elaboration:
P1 affirms a subtle and fairly intuitive notion that whatever the state-of-affairs are in reality (i.e., in the totality of existence) it simply does not inform us how they should be—what should be the case is despite what is the case. However, if moral facts exist, then they are exactly that: states-of-affairs that inform us of how reality should be—which entails that what should be the case is not despite what is the case. Therefore, P1 precludes the existence of moral facts as defined in P2. If moral facts cannot exist, then it is impossible for any true moral judgments, if they exist, to be expressing something objective and, thusly, prong-2 of the moral realist’s thesis is denied if the above argument is affirmed. It seems as though the moral realist must deny P1 to salvage moral facticity (from this argument), but this seems like an incredibly expensive maneuver: if states-of-affairs about reality can inform us how it ought to be, then it appears as though the question “it is the case, but should it be the case?” is not a universally valid question (which seems very implausible). Likewise, when one is presented with such a state-of-affairs that ground, objectively, a moral fact-of-the-matter called, let’s say, M, they cannot, if P1 is false, validly ask “it is the case that M, but should it be the case that M?”. However, this seems like a legitimate question: just because it is the case that there is such a state-of-affairs that (allegedly) grounds a moral fact, it does not seem to follow that it should be that way or that another state-of-affairs would not have been better. Nevertheless, this is the bullet a moral realist must bite: some state-of-affairs are simply what should be, and they cannot be questioned further about what they should be themselves.
Here's anticipated objections and responses:
There are various objections a moral realist can make that are worth noting. One could, as mentioned before, bite the bullet and deny P1; one could deny the underlying theory of truth required for P2 and adopt an alternative theory (e.g., pragmatist account, coherentism, deflationary account, etc.); or one could deny what is sometimes called the ‘direction-of-fit’ with respect to the statement and reality such that it is reversed: if, in P2, a moral fact has a ‘world-to-statement’ ‘direction-of-fit’, then, at least in principle, they are not statements about reality but rather exist as informants of reality. The first objection has already been addressed and the second is out of the scope of this, but the third is worth addressing further. By ‘direction-of-fit’ of a fact, it is meant as a specifier of the direction by which one should correspond the statement and reality. There are two options: a ‘reality-to-statement’ or ‘statement-to-reality’ direction-of-fit: the former implies that one attempts, in order to decipher the truth, to ‘fit’ (or correspond) reality with the statement (such that a state-of-affairs in reality makes the statement true) and the latter implies an attempt at ‘fitting’ the statement with reality (such that the statement is true if it agrees with a state-of-affairs in reality but isn’t immediately made true by a state-of-affairs). An example of the former is a human desire: if one desires X, then it is true that they desire X and this is made true solely because of the state-of-affairs responsible for generating a desire for X—there is no matching of the statement ‘I desire X’ with reality but, rather it is just true in virtue of its own creation; whereas an example of the latter is ‘I ran today 5 miles’: that statement is true iff there was a state-of-affairs in the past (today) which contained one running 5 miles—there is a matching of the statement with reality, and the statement is not true in virtue of some process(es). The moral realist, who takes this route, will say that moral judgments are like the former and not the latter, and P2 is assuming the latter. To this, I deny the validity of a ‘reality-to-statement’ direction-of-fit for anything: every proposition is true iff that statement corresponds to a state-of-affairs in reality and, as such, is made true only by matching with reality and never by some virtue of its own creation. Consequently, ‘I desire X’ is true iff I actually desire X: it is not true in virtue of me stating or thinking it. There is simply no such thing as a fact of which its truthity is sui generis.
Another worthy objection, albeit a misapprehension, is that this is an argument from Hume’s is-ought gap and, consequently, objections are directed towards this argument by proxy of objections raised to Hume’s, or some neo-Humian’s, is-ought gap argument. It is imperative that the reader understands that Hume’s Guillotine is an epistemic argument which does not negate the possibility of moral facts but, rather, notes that one cannot validly, in logical form, derive an prescriptive statement from an indicative statement; whereas the argument set out hereon is far bolder, being a ontological argument, that contends with the notion of a moral facts being impossible in virtue of normativity and objectivity being two different ontological categories.
The last noteworthy objection is a misunderstanding stemming from the term ‘reality’ and ‘states-of-affairs’: some moral non-naturalists will agree with my argument and merely add that it does not contend with their moral realist theories because they identify moral properties with supersensible, supernatural, or non-natural properties—thusly, they have no problem admitting that the way reality is never entails how it should be. However, this misunderstands the deployment of the terms ‘reality’ and ‘states-of-affairs’ in this argument: it is not referencing nature, the universe, or the world but, rather, the ‘totality of existence’—and ‘states-of-affairs’ is not referencing mere temporal nor spatiotemporal ‘states’ within reality but, rather, is any ‘arrangement’ of existent entities within reality. Consequently, for example, theistic and platonistic moral realist positions are not exempt from this argument.
There you go @Leontiskos: this (^) is a fully fleshed-out positive argument for moral anti-realism (irregardless of whether you agree with it).
Your argument seems to be, "Moral realism is false, therefore I can do whatever the heck I want! If moral realism is false, then I'll impose my tastes whenever I please!" So sure, on that account you can impose your tastes, or contradict yourself with impunity, or send millions of Jews to the gas chambers. Everything is fair game! I admit I wasn't prepared for the doubling-down on sociopathy. I was sort of hoping for more than that.
But the notion that your view is in some way rational is surely problematic, and you did admit this in your own way (). In this post () you attempt to give four steps that would precede coercion in matters of taste. Regarding those, I would invite you to ask yourself whether
Quoting Bob Ross
Actually, as I already noted, I have never encountered someone who believes it is rationally justifiable to impose tastes. "I have never heard anyone, on this forum or elsewhere, argue for this stupid position" (). Your claim that all moral non-realists hold your same position is false. "Moral subjectivism" is likely the most unendorsed form of anti-realism, and the variety of subjectivism that you endorse is virtually unheard of.
It depends on what you mean. I cannot do whatever I want in any meaningful, colloquial sense of the term because I must abide by my own moral law--viz., my 'ego', as the tip of the ice berg, can say 'I find this to be morally permissible', but if my true self does not then I am going to be in a world of hurt when I violate my own moral law; but, sure, that stems from my psychology too!
But this is true of yourself as well (so some extent), and is not absurd nor abnormal, just like everyone else: why do you enforce and care about the moral facts?. Because you simply like it—not because there is a fact of the matter (because there can’t be in this case, even if moral realism is true). So, let’s be consistent and apply your own reasoning to your own position:
Your axiology boils down to “I can do whatever the heck I want! I will, then, impose whatever values I please!” And you simply can't 'do whatever you want' in the sense that you will not allow yourself to violate the moral facts. See how this is analogous to the above?
You keep avoiding this because, at this point, I think you know it undermines your point here. This isn’t a gotcha moment, I would much rather you actually genuinely attempt at answering the hypothetical.
I will not allow myself to contradict myself (if I know it) nor send millions of jews to the gas chambers; but, yes, none of it is objectively wrong...that’s why moral subjectivism is a form of moral anti-realism.
Have you read Nietzsche? Based off of your responses, I bet you hate that man (; – but I could be wrong.
If by ‘sociopathy’ and ‘everything is fair game’ you are loaded the terms with objectivity, thusly presupposing your own view and consequently begging the question, then sure. I don’t use those terms that way, because I am not a moral realist.
I don’t think it is irrational to be a moral anti-realist, I’ve outlined what I mean by ‘rationality’, and you never once will answer my inquiries about what you mean by ‘rationality’. It seems like, for you, being rational requires one to be a moral realist...that’s kind of convenient, isn’t it?
This is correct (for the most part) and equally can be said of axiology. If the person doesn’t even agree with me on being logically consistent, for example, then I will deploy the same tactics I told you about plus some others to try and convince them otherwise; and at the end of the day if they are doing something really bad then I will use violence to stop them. this is no different than enforcing laws, axiological evaluations, and enforcing moral realism. You keep bringing up things that equally apply to your own position (as far as I can tell).
This question isn't a piggy-back, its totally askance from the thread - Are you using the word 'impose' here to include 'encourage', or is it more definite?
The vast majority I have ever talk to or heard of have held that preferences can be imposed on other people. The only moral anti-realism view that in principle doesn't allow it is nihilism...but I've heard some of them also allow for impositions of preferences.
Moral non-cognitivist positions, like emotivism, absolutely agree with me on this point.
Moral subjectivists absolutely agree with me on this point.
You are thinking of moral nihilism or amoralism and conflating it with moral anti-realism.
They do not hold that tastes can be imposed on other people, and that is what you have consistently held.
Quoting Bob Ross
You're obviously begging the question.
Quoting Bob Ross
No, because what I "want" flows from my "subjectivity," and what I am bound by (morality) flows from something that is objective. To say that I can do whatever I want would require abandoning moral realism, hence my point. I cannot do whatever I want, for I am bound by what is objectively moral and right.
If there is a speed limit of 55 mph that I am bound to obey, then I cannot do whatever I want. Suppose you repudiate the speed law. I conclude, "You can drive as fast as you want!" You respond that you have certain subjective inclinations that tend to limit your speed to 55 mph, and that, after all, we are both in the same boat with regard to a speed limit. But this is patently false, for we are not in the same situation at all. I can expand if you disagree.
Your point is presumably that either I could also choose to repudiate the speed limit, or else that I am lying about my belief that the speed limit binds me. If I am lying then we are in the same boat, but of course I am not lying. I could choose to repudiate the speed limit, but I have not done so, and therefore we are not in the same boat.
Then, positively, if I saw someone imposing his ice cream taste, I would deem him irrational. It wouldn't matter at all if he really cares about that ice cream flavor. I would still deem him irrational. And if I saw someone else imposing a taste, that would also be irrational. Namely, if I saw someone imposing something like an ice cream taste, that would be irrational. You say that you are willing to impose things that are like ice cream tastes, and therefore I deem you irrational. You say, "Ah, but the difference is that I really care about it." It makes no difference. You are still irrational. Tastes don't become imposable when someone cares about them a lot. Imposition requires more than that. I suspect that you know this. You know it is irrational to impose ice cream tastes, even if one cares about them a great deal. And you know that if X is not imposable, and Y is like X, then Y is also not imposable.
It is more definite. It is my ice cream case ().
I will say, though, that the central problem is that you mistake states of affairs with physical reality, and Michael has addressed this in detail in the other thread. Of course if you assert an ontological position which denies the possibility of normative realities then normative realities will be excluded from your ontology. But as I have noted, beginning with totalizing, abstract, categorical systems is just a poor way to do philosophy, or to think in general. If you are not able to consider individual propositions independently of your a priori system, then you have walled yourself off from new data, information, and insight.
Those who have disagreed have either claimed that it is false that one ought not kick puppies for fun, or engaged in the special pleading that despite common usage it is neither true nor false.
Neither reply is tenable.
It's not true. You've done nothing other than basically saying you believe it and it should be true (ding ding bloody ding lol).
Your point, is exactly as i outlined it, and fails just as spectacularly.
Your claim of 'untenable' is supported by what?? Your imagination that no one is capable of making that claim?
it isn't true. It's normative. Go ahead and beat hte argument, instead of just making a claim.
62% leaned toward moral realism.
Not as high as for external word realism, but perhaps enough to show our anti-realist and non-cognitivist friends hereabouts that they might have missed something.
So you know where you stand on moral questions, but you do not consider those statements that set out that stance to be true?
How can that be made coherent? You know things that are not true?
Again, moral realism is simply the view that there are true moral statements. Are you sure you reject this?
I guess the same way I justify aesthetic taste. Plus I generally assume there’s broad intersubjective agreement about many matters based on shared human experience. I don’t spend much time worrying about coherence as a rule but maybe I should.
Quoting Banno
It’s not that I reject it, I just see no clear way to believe it. When you say there are true moral statements my intuition is to ask, based on what criteria?
I am happy with a foundational principle such as, we should not cause suffering, but that foundation rests on what exactly? Codified behaviour based upon the habits of culture?
I'm not asking you to justify your moral stance, but to explain how it can be not true. In aesthetic terms, you claim would have to be that despite, say, liking sugar in your morning coffee, you do not think it true that "Tom likes sugar in his morning coffee".
Quoting Tom Storm
Yep. Another way to say this is that there is broad intersubjective agreement as to what is true.
Quoting Tom Storm
Good. Now if you are a moral realist, you would say that "we should not cause suffering" is true. If you reject moral realism, you somehow have to maintain that we should not cause suffering, and yet deny that "we should not cause suffering" is true.
Gets complex, doesn't it. It's hard to have a foundational principle that is not true.
What you have brought ought here is that the justification is a seperate issue to the truth of the proposal. The point has been made several times throughout this thread, by a few of the more well-versed folk, but some are deaf to it.
Well, I would put it this way, I would like people to share my foundational principle - but I have nothing to point to its truth other than I choose it, the way I might choose a preferred art work. And I know that many would share my choices. I can’t find my way to truth in this.
I’m deaf to this too, I’m afraid.
But you have your foundational principles - that is, you take them to be true. Hence you are a moral realist.
How you justify that belief is over to you, and irrelevant to whether you are a moral realist or not.
Ok, I see that. In that case a moral realist can say anything. I was assuming that to be a realist you had to have some sort of foundational guarantee for the belief, like Platonism or some other magical thinking.
Well, one hopes for coherence. And as you say, folk tend to agree on the basics.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's a pretty widespread misunderstanding.
The main motivation against moral realism, especially around here, is the naturalism that takes scientific fact as the only sort of truth worthy of the title. The notion has a strong place in pop science culture, and comes to us mainly from the logical empiricists, Ayer and Carnap and so on. They denigrate moral language as not based on scientific reality, and by extension seek to mark ethical statements as not truth-apt; as being mere opinion or taste or some such, and hence (somewhat inconsistently) as being neither true nor false.
This motivation was clear in the present thread.
Also, of they contradict ones own values, how does one choose what to do?
Kant said through pure practical reason. Others say via ethical intuition.
Quoting bert1
I asked this question myself several years ago.
Unless you mean something other than ‘preference’ by ‘taste’, then they absolutely do. Moral non-cognitivists, like emotivists, hold that our moral judgments are expressions of our emotions, like ‘Boo! Yayyy!’, and the vast majority don’t see anything wrong with doing that. They don’t end their articles or essays with ‘but this is all just irrational and we should stop doing it’.
How? Is your enforcement of the moral facts not a taste you have? It can’t be a moral fact, can it?
Leontiskos, I never doubted that for a second, what I am saying is that the ‘what [that]...flows from something objective’ doesn’t entail nor imply that you should want to enforce or impose them on other people (which flows from subjectivity). So, why are you warranted in imposing that taste on other people?
My other point was that my position, like yours, does not entail that ‘I can do whatever I want’ in the colloquial use of that sentence, because I am not claiming everything is morally permissible.
Of course, I agree these are not equivocal, but they are analogous….and that’s my point. You upholding and caring about the speed limit (law) is subjective and you cannot ground it in objectivity. This is required for you to enforce yourself and others to go only 55 mph, but this does not negate that there is a fact-of-the-matter of a 55 mph speed limit. My point is that what is analogous is that you are subjectively enforcing the law, and I am subjectively enforcing my law: so, if, according to you, we are never justified in imposing subjectivity on each other, then why are you justified in subjecting me to the law if it requires your subjective enforcement (caring) of the law. This is the line between axiology and morality, such I am trying to get you to see that they are companions in guilt.
I think you missed the point, and I refer you to what I noted above. You seem to skip over the fact that you have no objective reason to enforce the law.
I think this is simply because it is so far out of the norm of things people really care about and you don’t approve of people caring that much about ice cream—not that there is some sort of fact out there that deems it false, nor that they are being logically inconsistent nor incoherent. What’s contradictory about imposing ice cream tastes on people? Nothing. It’s weird, odd, and most people will disapprove; but it is not logically inconsistent nor incoherent.
I personally would not impose tastes that are like ice cream tastes, but what I am saying is that fundamentally how we decide what is worth imposing with respect to tastes is just what we care enough about. I don’t care enough about ice cream flavors to impose that on other people: it seems very trivial and it violates my own moral law. I very much believe in human rights, believe it or not...they just aren’t derived from something objective (;
By ‘taste’ I don’t just mean superficial preferences, I mean all preferences; and perhaps you are excluding deeper preferences from the term ‘taste’ because you keep going back to the ice cream example.
What exactly does it require? And how are you not being incoherent with respect to axiology?
I am saying that what is imposable is fundamentally subjective and determined by the degree of interest a person has in something. By ‘interest’ I don’t just mean superficial hobbies, I mean things like ‘I am very interested in not letting people torture other people’ or ‘increasing human rights’. Personally, I don’t approve of imposing ice cream tastes because I don’t care about it enough nor approve of other people caring about it that much to impose it on each other. I think the world is a (subjectively) better place where people can eat whatever ice cream they want.
I totally get being low on time, but this is the major issue of this conversation is that you keep ignoring large chunks of my responses and then hostilely respond with less relevant information. We are making no progress because, I would say, you are not genuinely contending with the majority of what I am saying. You just keep defaulting to “you can’t impose tastes”, “that’s irrational”, etc.
I would respectfully ask that you wait and respond when you do have time, because I appreciate responses with substance over quick responses.
Interesting: can you elaborate? I specifically put in a paragraph addressing this because it is a common objection: I would say that ‘state-of-affair’ is referring to any arrangement, atemporal or temporal or spatial or aspatial alike, and not physical reality. I know non-naturalists and theists are generally going to want to escape going this route, but I don’t think they can. I am also talking about moral facts from God’s nature, and platonic forms. If you beg to differ, then I am all ears!
The reason I deny it is not dogmatic: it is because of P1. You would have to reject P1 to accept normative realities that are supersensible.
I have consider moral naturalist, theist, and non-naturalist realist positions with respect to as many as I can get my hands on. I can assure you I have not just whimsically decided to cut myself off from a rich subset of moral realism. I don’t think any of them work, and my argument boils down to that one I shared previously and because I just don’t buy the positive arguments for those positions themselves.
If you disagree, then please provide me with some arguments or a contention with my argument.
If Banno's view is realism, it is an extremely thin, watered down realism where "truth" is nothing more than how we use the word, regardless of what "truth" actually means. Neither does it rule out moral truth relativism. Its therefore probably not a kind of realism that is problematic for an anti-realist.
Then what does a chess claim follow from, if not the arbitrary system of chess?
Quoting Leontiskos
"Taxonomical system" is a puffed up way of saying, "knowing what the words mean". Every single proposition requires knowing what the words mean. So can our already devolving discussion account for two systems simultaneously? I.e., the system of chess, and the language system within which the claims are made? Or can we agree to ignore the system that is common to every claim?
Quoting Leontiskos
Your definition is an arbitrary assertion that flies in the face of actual usage. A verbal bolus pulled straight out of your ass, no better than if I said
"Airplanes are things that fly."
"But, birds are not airplanes."
"Well, according to my philosophical definition they are!"
Quoting Leontiskos
Just because you come from a culture that believes its values are decrees from God doesn't mean everyone is running around thinking that way. The fact that people, including philosophers, confuse their values for objective facts hardly amounts to a conspiracy. People get this wrong about their food and music preferences. Why shouldn't they get it wrong about moral values?
Quoting Leontiskos
Its you realists that struggle, that throw up your hands and say "whelp, its a brute fact, what else can I say! Explanation's gotta stop somewhere!". This is an anti-scientific, anti-philosophical attitude.
Quoting Leontiskos
Total non-argument. One can attempt to answer any question, independent of what their interlocutor thinks or not. This is a powerfully weak excuse for your refusal to answer anything. How can you accuse us of asking endless "why's", when you have not answered even one?
Quoting Leontiskos
Why on earth would I waste time on a philosophical account of truth on someone who can't even stick to the right dictionary definition?
Quoting Leontiskos
:lol: :rofl:
I would whole-heartedly agree. But his persistence in pretending his proclamations amount to 'truth-making statements' is absurd, and in service to pretending moral realism is a done deal. At least, that's his version.
:ok: It always amounts to this. I wonder if Banno is actually a secret theist.
That's true of moral statements, and it is not inconsistent. It is true of all moral statements.
The cool thing about the position i hold is, is that nothing you or Leontiskos have asserted has any affect on the premise that 'There are no objective moral standards'. So, without a 'chosen' system there literally are no true moral statements, and that hasn't even been addressed by continually just stating that kicjking puppies for fun is wrong. Yep, that's your view.
On with yee. LOL
It's either that or infinitism.
Brute facts seem more reasonable to me than an infinite regress.
Because this is a philosophy forum, and when you critique someone else's definition of a term such as 'moral' or 'truth' while simultaneously refusing to offer your own definition, you come off as a petulant child who hacks away with their naive intuitions, incapable of rigorous thought or reflection.
That's a fair thing to intuit. I intuit the other way. Any interest in hashing that out?
You are the child playing with essentially homonyms of "true": "True likeness!" "True levelling plane!". Just because I refuse to engage with this rhetorical idiocy does not obligate me to the labor of providing a philosophical definition of truth, which is a mare's nest and really an activity you only intend as deflection and distraction from your mistake.
Then I will just end the conversation with an analogy. Consider the case of a fellow who, for whatever reason, does not currently engage in the act of visual sight. We can leave aside the question of 'why' (maybe it is because he has his eyelids closed and has never learned to open them; maybe he was born without eyes or without sight; maybe he has gouged out his own eyes; maybe there is some other reason).
He hears others argue and speak about so-called "visual objects." Impatiently, he says, "What are you talking about!? There is no such thing as visual objects! Prove to me that they exist. I admit that there are auditory, sensory, olfactory, and taste-based objects. I absolutely deny any other sui generis category of object. Prove to me, on the basis of these four objects, that visual objects exist." The others don't know what to make of the challenge. Perhaps they tell him to open his eyes. Perhaps they attempt an eye-surgery. Perhaps they try for some manner of artificial sight. They know as well as he that the challenge he has provided is logically impossible to fulfill. He has painted himself into a corner, and he cannot be gotten out on his own terms. Either something breaks through his logical system from without, or else he remains in darkness.
Good luck.
In science, brute facts are a last resort. Scientific analysis doesn't stop, "why does an election have a negative charge" is not a brute fact, and has an explanation in terms of particle physics, afaik. Science may some day arrive at an ultimate fact that explains itself. Until then, they will keep pushing deeper.
Whereas here, the moral realists seem to use the notion of brute facts to excuse them from offering any explanations whatsoever.
I don't think they are.
This seems to me to be a result of direction of fit. When we discover a new thing we investigate it, and then we talk about it, making words that fit the thing discovered. The direction of fit here is from word to world, we change what we say to match what we find.
But for moral truths the direction of fit is reversed.We would change the world to match how it ought to be. We don't discover moral truths so much as enact them.
Quoting bert1
I doubt that there could be a general answer to this question, any more than there might be a general answer for when, say, a scientific investigation does not match the expected result. Is it a fault of the experiment? A mistake in the calculations? Is there something not understood in the theory? Or does the theory need major modification? Finding the answer is not easy.
It's called a "value". One can hold values, tastes, preferences, without being obligated that any of these is "true" in an objective sense. One is only obligated to the trivial claim that "That I hold this value/taste/preference is true".
If moral facts are brute facts then there is no explanation.
How do you know they are brute facts? By your inability to explain them?
The thing is, there are areas of research pointing to there being explanations beyond mere brute fact. See Jon Haidt's The Rightous Mind. There is value in understanding one's tendencies to moral judgement in order to deal with those tendencies skillfully.
So to be clear, the Nazis were also enacting moral truths?
If moral facts are not reducible to non-moral facts (whether physical or mathematical or magical) then they must be brute.
You seem to be confusing metaethics with descriptive ethics. Moral facts, as per moral realism, are independent from our moral judgements.
This is true - But i think the fundamental problem you, Bob Ross, and I have all come across these last weeks - is that it may not be the case that there is no explanation - but that realists can't grok/don't notice the deeper facts that explain their position, or the competing position. When a moral claim is made and called Brute, I can recognize the deeper facts it rests on, generally. It is the plum non-engagement with them that frustrates the discussion, from my view.
:wink:
Quoting Michael
I don't think I posted to that thread. It seemed to me to be asking why we ought to do what we ought to do.
Quoting Apustimelogist
The meaning of a word is its use in an utterance.
You might learn something from my thread on the logic of truth. There's another on the relation between belief and truth, which you might find useful. I've also set out some more general comments about Realism.
Quoting hypericin
Bishops move diagonally. Sydney is in Australia. You stop on the red light. Any fact determined by convention.
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't think you have understood the phrase "truth-maker". Nor is it a phrase I would use.
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh, yes. I'm well-known hereabouts for my defence of theism.
Quoting AmadeusD
That's more about your inability to understand an unexpected point of view than about ethics.
Quoting hypericin
So you think you can have a preference for foolishness without it being true that "hypericin has a preference for foolishness". Very clever.
Quoting hypericin
What do you think? You are responsible for your beliefs.
There are three possible options:
1. There are no moral facts (error theory)
2. There are moral facts that can be explained by non-moral facts (ethical naturalism)
3. There are moral facts that cannot be explained by non-moral facts (ethical non-naturalism)
If ethical non-naturalism is correct then moral facts cannot be explained by physics or mathematics or anything non-moral. So what sort of explanation do you expect from then?
Quoting Leontiskos
An inapt analogy. Moral non-realists hold the same moral values, feel the same moral feelings. We just don't assign to them the meaningless honorifics "fact of the world", "objectively true". Which you can't account for, you can't deduce, you can't explain, you can't verify, not just to us, but even among yourselves. But you nonetheless insist on.
No. It's about exactly what i said it was about - further proclamations without support don't help. Hope this helps :)
On this we agree.
You've not at all understood what i actually said - which is that there are further explanations that they choose not to engage.
"One ought not kick puppies for fun"
Why?
"Because it hurts the puppy"
And then there's a further conversation. The old mates making moral claims around here seem to think that after the claim, nothing comes.
The question is one about motivation. Knowing that I ought to do something isn't always enough to convince me to do it. Sometimes I do things I know I ought not do.
If it could be proved that I ought eat babies I still wouldn't.
As I pointed out. Quoting hypericin
Can you even read two sentences?
Quoting Banno
Yawn. You don't strike me as very clever at all.
That's ethical naturalism. Ethical non-naturalism, by definition, cannot offer this kind of explanation.
If ethical non-naturalism is correct then either:
1) "one ought not X" is a brute fact, or
2) "one ought not X" is true because "one ought not Y" is true, and "one ought not Y" is a brute fact.
Great. I agree then, morals are determined by convention.
Yes. I am pointing out the flaw in that notion. I'm not disagreeing with your possible view points at all. I'm merely pointing out that that position is an ignorant one.
Why is it a flaw? If infinitism is incorrect then there are, necessarily, brute physical facts. If there are brute physical facts then why can't there be brute moral facts?
Because that position is ignorant of the deeper facts related to any moral claim.
Edit: my current position, above. Not a be-all-end-all. But, in these recent conversations this seems true of all moral claims made. The ethical naturalist may not want to explore those deeper bits of data, but they exist, so, it's a flaw.
All you seem to be saying here is that moral realism is incorrect.
Obviously this is begging the question.
Luckily for me, you've actually quoted my saying more than that. And giving a reason why that's the case - because the deep facts in regard to any claim are necessarily left untouched to support the view that there aren't any - which is obviously the claim of a moral realist if they believe their moral statements are brute. It begs no question.
I've given you an example, which you've quoted. To be noted, though, is that this concept can apply to any claim.
Do you recall the below?
"One ought not kick puppies for fun"
Why?
"Because it hurts the puppy"
And then there's a further conversation.
The bold and underlined, and italicised is a deeper fact about why kicking puppies for fun is wrong. The moral realists I've encountered (particularly here) don't seem to think either that A. those facts exists; or B. are relevant to supporting the statement itself.
I think both are mistaken. Therefore, my position is that the moral realist has work to do. They may not believe those explanations are required, but they are available - and so their position can be reduced to deeper facts. Why aren't they engaging them? This is my issue.
According to ethical non-naturalism, moral facts cannot be explained in non-moral terms, so arguing that ethical non-naturalism is false because it cannot explain moral facts in non-moral terms is begging the question.
I understand. I'm not quite sure where we're getting wires crossed.
I'm aware that is the naturalist position - but my position is that: that is factually wrong. There are further explanations available and to just ignore them doesn't constitute it being impossible. Unsure if i can clarify that further.
Then you're simply stating your disagreement with ethical non-naturalism (and moral realism). That's fine, but it doesn't constitute a rebuttal of their position.
Sorry, I don't understand how pointing out a fatal flaw in a claim isn't a rebuttal? Deny facts that exist is surely a fatal flaw in a position?
Like, i could certainly wrong but if what i've said is the case, then **discreet** (edited in)ethical naturalist claims fail at the first hurdle.
John says that God exists.
Jane says that John's claim is fatally flawed because God doesn't exist.
Jane says that God doesn't exist.
John says that Jane's claim is fatally flawed because God does exist.
Michael says that moral facts cannot be explained in non-moral terms.
AmadeusD says that Michael's claim is fatally flawed because moral facts can be explained in non-moral terms.
AmadeusD says that moral facts can be explained in non-moral terms.
Michael says that AmadeusD's claim is fatally flawed because moral facts cannot be explained in non-moral terms.
None of these are rebuttals. They're just two people stating their conflicting beliefs.
Ahh, Ok I think I see where we're crossing wires. That's not at all how the rebuttal actual is. See below:
Michael claims (fictionally) that the claim 'one ought not kick puppies for fun' is true, and brute (i.e admits of no deeper facts to whcih it can be reduced)
Amadeus says (in contracted form) That's wrong - here are the deeper facts on which your claim rests (add in suffering, arbitrariness or whatever).
Michael says No. "
But those deeper facts remain in existence, and do, in fact, support the claim.
This is quite different from your version of the hypothetical exchange. In yours, I offer no explanation of my claim. In my version, I offer a precise and specifically relevant rebuttal to the claim that there are no deeper facts.
So yeah, it's a rebuttal. I guess you could say the rebuttal is "there are always deeper facts" Which is not my opinion, but something i claim to actually be the case. That's a rebuttal, whether its strong or not.
You have claimed that one ought not kick the puppy because it hurts the puppy. The ethical non-naturalist, being a non-naturalist, rejects this connection. You are begging the question and assuming ethical naturalism.
The ethical non-naturalist might refer to Hume: one cannot derive an ought from an is.
No, I haven't. I have presented a deeper fact about the claim - whether i believe that's the case is somewhat by the by. The rebuttal is there are deep facts about moral claims. If an ethical naturalist rejects that, so be it. That's the rebuttal they actually have to grapple with instead of just jettisoning and pretending those facts arren't pertinent to their claim.
Again, whether i'm correct or not, this is a rebuttal to ethical naturalism. Their denial doesn't do anything for their position other than expound it in some sense.
In a more involved circumstance, I may indeed refer to Hume to support the contention and I think our flow is similar on that. But it's unneeded here as the mere existence of those facts, and their patent connection to the moral claim, is enough to defeat the position that ... there are no deeper facts for the statement to be reduced to. Because.. there they are. And simply denying a connection to them isn't an adequate response.
For it to be a rebuttal you must prove that moral facts can be explained in non-moral terms. You must prove that "one ought not kick puppies for fun because it hurts the puppy" is true.
As you haven't proven it, only asserted it, it begs the question.
Hold them how? For they cannot hold them to be true!
Quoting hypericin
...and that is realism.
Ahh, ok I'm groking you now. I still don't think that's right, though.
To my mind, and my understanding, what you're asking me to do is prove another ethical framework is true (something which would amount to those deeper facts establishing the 'correct' (to the view-holder's mind) ethical reason for the statement to be true))... I'm not trying to do that. Merely, that the claim of a ethical naturalist isn't tenable.
One would treat this as a reductio, that shows the supposed argument to have gone astray. That one ought not eat babies takes precedence over the argument.
Davidson offered an account that tried to account for weakness of the will in an otherwise rational mind, with I think some success. Have you read ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’
You’re arguing that ethical non-naturalism isn’t tenable because it disagrees with your ethical naturalism. That’s not a rebuttal, it’s begging the question.
I’m not sure what it has to do with weakness? I’m questioning the extent to which moral obligations are a sufficient motivator.
1. You've got the positions backwards, but i imagine that was just haste. No guff. Naturalism is what I take issue with.
2. Ok. Suffice to say 'No. That's not the case' and that I can't spend any more time enumerating that moral claims cannot be brute facts, independent of my personal ethical view. But that's what i've done. So i'll leave it there.
Aye, you can say that again. And I'm sure you will. :grin:
Quoting Michael
I'm more with @Banno on this one. Obligation and motivation can't be fully separated. If it were proved to you, then you would eat babies. If you refuse to eat babies, then the argument simply hasn't convinced you, probably because you find your own moral claim more compelling than the argument.
(The "weakness of will" pertains to your first sentence, "Knowing that I ought to do something isn't always enough...")
How so? I don’t see a problem with knowing that I ought to do one thing but choosing to do another because, say, it’s in my self interest.
And I have been explaining non-naturalism so now I don’t understand the relevance of your comments.
Nah. This fiction is somewhat believable on an individual level, but if you draw out the timeline and look at cultural moral beliefs and cultural moral practices, as well as the way these shift over time, you are plainly wrong. The Aztecs sacrificed children to their god, Tlaloc. Christianity doesn't even permit abortion. The notion that we all act the same regardless of what we believe is a load of nonsense.
I think oughtness correlates to motivation. So your word 'prove' made me think of the limit correlation: necessary action. But if that's not what you meant I can soften it: if it is "proved" to you that you ought to eat babies, then you will necessarily be less opposed to eating babies than you were prior to the proof. Speaking of personal obligation ("I ought") independently of motivation doesn't make sense to me. If someone really believes they ought to do something, then they are motivated to do it in one way or another, to one degree or another.
There is no relevant difference in moral behavior between realists and non-realists I am aware of. Non-realists are not morally blind, as your analogy suggests. We just reject your dogma that moral values are objectively true.
Are you making the ludicrous claim that the Aztecs were all moral non-realists?
And the person in my analogy perceives no difference between himself and those who claim they can see. For those who can see the difference is enormous.
Ok, well sorry then.
Lol. What is this difference? Keep in mind we are talking about behavior.
Though to be fair, moral realists are the ones who have always committed the moral disgrace of imposing their values by force "because they are true".
Can you please explain to me, as if i'm five years old what's going on with the following that results in it being question begging?
Position: Moral statements cannot be reduced to deeper facts (i.e are brute)
Rebuttal: Moral statements necessarily rely on deeper facts, whether you engage them or not (i.e they cannot be brute, fundamentally).
Which part begs the question? (I am not being facetious in any way).
If the "deeper fact" is itself moral, then this is not a rebuttal. If the "deeper fact" is non-moral, then this is a response to ethical naturalism, which no one here is promoting (ignoratio elenchi).
But more simply, to rebut "moral statements are brute," with, "moral statements cannot be brute," is obviously ad hoc. See , or Monty Python's <The Argument Clinic>.
"It is true that I hold this value" is not moral realism any more than "it is true that I like ice cream" taste realism.
I've rewritten this several times, just to say that up front. Pick away.
This could be a way of introducing what's important rather than what is true. It's that we have foundational principles at all that makes us count as a moral realist -- but note how this is different from whether or not they are true foundational principles. I'm fine with moral realism as a kind of default position so that one must raise doubts, especially in philosophy (and especially given the unpopularity of ethics). But doubts can be raised, and I hope I've done enough to show that my doubts are not based in a scientism, but rather are what I'd call a rather old fashioned moral doubt: the kind that people refer to when they speak in terms of faith. If Jesus is coming back, then shouldn't he have come here by now? If moral realism is true, then shouldn't we know something about what's good?
I think your division between truth and justification holds with respect to claims on knowledge. So insofar that ethics is a knowledge my doubt would deflate. It's that claim to knowledge which I doubt anyone possesses: if no one knows then we are all ignorant, which would mean that we're all functionally nihilists. In that case morality may sound reasonable, but that doesn't mean it's rational or known.
Maybe someday. But now, while we kill each other for all the various reasons printed in our newspapers? Faith is the only response I can think of as reasonable in such a world as this. The other is that killing is good (sometimes) which is the very claim that causes my doubt. If killing is good (sometimes) then I am the one who knows nothing about goodness, and what I want is to know how it is that killing is good (sometimes). I want a moral justification for violence, given that our entire way of life is based upon violence.
But what I doubt is that our way of life is actually good. Any way of life that depends upon killing others to perpetuate itself seems to have missed the moral lesson, to misunderstand, to be ignorant -- and all presently lived ways of life are ignorant in this exact way.
So, as I said, I'm the one that's the odd-ball out. It's an odd case to think killing is bad, simpliciter. I can make way for necessary evils or some such, but I can never really understand how killing is good, actually or really. I'm no pacifist because that's an unrealistic standard -- but I cannot deny that the pacifist has a handle on moral goodness better than most, if anything true about goodness can be said at all. Most would make excuses, and understandably so given how much we rely upon violence since we live in nation-states, a most violent social-organism -- and note how the instinct to point out how the past is bad kicks up here, as if that would excuse us rather than point out how we're all still the same as we've always been: excusing violence with the language of goodness. And if that's all we do with morality, in its actual effects rather than in the philosophy room, then what worth is there in speaking this way? Why is it important?
Who thinks this is realism? What anti-realist would say that?
@Michael @@Leontiskos
Are you agreeing with this??
What is it you think moral realism amounts to, if not that there are moral statements that are true or false?
It's been explained repeatedly that in the context of this thread moral realism is more than truth aptness.
"It is true that I hold this value" is not a moral statement. It is a statement about my personal values.
Just as "It is true that I believe in evolution" a not a statement about biology. It is a statement about my beliefs.
"I believe in evolutionary theory", "Evolutionary theory is true", are totally different claims, and have independent truth tables.
You can be a realist about the first sort of claim (who isn't), while being anti-realist about the second.
Yes, I notices you moving the goalposts. It doesn't help you, unless you can show how you hold a value without holding that value to be true, in which case we are entitled to conclude that you think values truth apt.
1. Moral propositions are not truth-apt (non-cognitivism)
2. Moral propositions are truth-apt (cognitivism)
2a. All moral propositions are false (error theory)
2b. Some moral propositions are true and these are subjectively true (moral subjectivism)
2c. Some moral propositions are true and these are objectively true (moral realism)
Moral anti-realism encompasses 1, 2a, and 2b.
Right. Moral realists say statements about morality report facts.
The fact we're looking for here is not that people say X is wrong. The fact has to be that X is objectively wrong.
My objection would be that "objectively" does nothing here. Hence moral realism is that there are true moral statements.
That's your personal issue, though. I don't think anyone else has that problem.
It's not as simple as that.
Moral Anti-Realism
Even your quote from a different article continued with "... (although some accounts of moral realism see it as involving additional commitments, say to the independence of the moral facts from human thought and practice, or to those facts being objective in some specified way)."
I'm not moving the goalposts, I never believed this was a moral statement. I can hold a moral value without holding that it is true in the same way I can have a taste preference without holding that the preference is true. I can believe "coffee is better than tea", it is true that "I believe coffee is better than tea", without believing "coffee is better than tea" is a true fact of the objective world.
There's an article on moral realism in SEP as well, the one from which my quote came. It doe snot use "objective" in the definition, but notes
I've said before I don't really care what you call it. the interesting bit is that moral statements have a truth value.
Many in this discussion believe that moral statements have a truth value. The main disagreement seems to be precisely on its objectivity.
Are they true because of social convention, or are they true even if everyone believed and behaved otherwise?
How is one to make sense of this? You have a preference for Vegemite but don't think "hypericin prefers Vegemite" is true? You think folk ought keep their promises, but don't think "folk ought keep their promises" true? It's incoherent.
Think I've made that point once or twice before.
I'm not surprised. The term is a pest.
Quoting Banno
1. The diamond is made of carbon
2. The diamond is worth $1,000
We can all be wrong about (1) but can't all be wrong about (2). (2) is true because of social conventions/intersubjective agreement, etc. whereas (1) is true even if we all believe otherwise.
Are moral truths like (1) or like (2)?
Lol, perhaps I am blind, or perhaps you see things which are not really there....
Imagine a man walks in on a group of people arguing fervently about how far one can throw a square circle. Each person has spent decades upon decades meticulously studying the topic and are presenting their conclusion: the man can hear one say "it is 3 feet, I tell you!", another "nay, it is 50 feet!". The man half-heartedly says "but...there is no such thing as a square circle.", which produces deafening silence. No one knows what to do or what to say to the man: they are at a loss of words. The man leaves and, finally, a person musters up the strength to say "poor man, he is like a blind man...how are we to convince him of the existence of square circles?!?".
:kiss:
Depends on the statement in question. "One ought keep one's promises" is a bit like (2) in that it depends on convention. "One ought not kick puppies for fun" is in some ways not like (1) because the fit is reversed.
Any follow through? Moral statements are many and various.
Some things are true if everyone says so and some things are true even if everyone says otherwise.
Which of these is the case for moral truths?
There's no single case here. Moral statements are many and varied.
Yes, but this can be examined in more detail:
1. “One ought not X” is true if everyone says so
2. “One ought not Y” is true even if everyone says otherwise
Is (2) the case for some Y, and if so how do we know? Can it be proved with empirical evidence and/or reasoned argument? Is it an intuition? Is it unknowable?
Or is (2) never the case? Is every moral truth a case of (1)?
Does this provide some clear account of objective and subjective?
Is it any different for statements without "ought"?
"You should kick puppies" is true, and "You should not kick puppies" is true. Something seems wrong here.
For sure :wink:
I don't, but I can set out an argument to properly lay out the options:
If moral sentences are truth-apt then either some moral sentence is true or it is not wrong to eat babies.
If it is wrong to eat babies then either it would not be wrong to eat babies if everyone were to say so or it would be wrong to eat babies even if everyone were to say otherwise.
So we have:
1. Moral sentences are not truth-apt (non-cognitivism), or
2. It is not wrong to eat babies (error theory), or
3. It would not be wrong to eat babies if everyone were to say so (subjectivism), or
4. It would be wrong to eat babies even if everyone were to say otherwise (realism)
There seems to be the presumption that if evidence or reasoning cannot be provided in support of (4) then either (2) or (3) should be accepted by default. I think that this presumption should itself be questioned.
5. It's a lot more fun to play with babies than to eat them. (emotivism)
Quoting Michael
Isn't this like voting? If I vote for Washington then I believe it is true that, "Washington would be the best president." The outcome of the election reflects the opinion of the majority, but it does not make anyone's opinion true or false. It only decides who the president is. A vote and a prediction are two different things.
It seems to me that a similar equivocation occurs with respect to "worth." If we are speaking about worth as market value, then (2) is a form of speculation, and in that case we can all be wrong about (2). If we are speaking about worth in the sense of simple valuation, then the market does not determine worth, and the market value can deviate from worth. If we are speaking about worth in the sense of an offer made during the act of bartering (or a bid at an auction), then we are talking about an offer rather than a simple valuation, and these offers will of course affect the price it fetches. "Worth" is therefore a complex and equivocal concept, but in no case is there a subjective truth. Truths about subjective states, or consensuses, or poll results, or auctions, or agreements, are all objective truths.
I think all such arguments in favor of "subjective truth" fall apart in similar ways. But the other difficulty is that I don't think anyone in this thread has taken morality to be a form of consensus, and this is presumably because we all know that consensus is not per se binding. I still think <"bindingness"> is the better way to think about this subject. Morality is binding; that which is subjective is not binding; therefore that which is subjective is not morality.
Oddly enough, it may be @AmadeusD who is most consistent on this point. His approach is that it is only true that he should not torture babies. Someone might want to call that "moral subjectivism," and if we call it moral subjectivism then I think it is the only coherent form of moral subjectivism in this thread.
Thank you very much for this. Hmm. Maybe I'm conflating what's being rebutted then and missing that entirely.. because I just reject this entirely as to what i've attempted to do (stick with me, lol).. So: would it make sense of what i've been saying if it were transposed to be a rebuttal to that claim viz.
Claim: "One ought not kick puppies" (as a brute fact, ostensibly supporting the ethical position)
Response: Hey, that is actually not a brute fact (because XYZ underlying facts/data)
would be a rebuttal of that claim, but not the ethical framework? If this is what it appears to be, that would solve any issue i had with the exchange previous.
Quoting Leontiskos
showing that they cannot, surpasses this though, surely.
I guess what i mean to say here, is that I am claiming that the position that Moral facts are brute consists in them not being reducible. But if they are necessarily reducible, they are not brute facts.
Assume that's true - Am i just fucking up on applying this to the framework rather than any particular claim?
(im sorry, i've had to put this together between harrowing bits of work. Ill try edit for clarity later if need be but feel free to make what would normally be annoying observations a bout how badly ive worded things)
Yes, that's right. The position is not, "Every moral statement cannot be reduced to deeper facts." It is that, "Moral statements cannot be reduced to non-moral facts." See: .
Quoting AmadeusD
In this thread the anti-realists are misunderstanding the intentions of the realists in a variety of ways. None of us have tried to concretely justify a brute moral fact. The examples are attempting to illustrate the coherence and integrity of moral realism, repelling the arguments which attempt to detract. So if someone tried to justify a brute moral fact, and you showed that it was not brute, then that would be a meaningful objection to the example. But no one has attempted such a thing. In different ways we have all been trying to show that the schema upon which the arguments against moral realism depend is fatally flawed.
Suppose someone asks me to justify some claim and I provide an explanation. If they object again, and their objection is rooted in the belief that
— Leontiskos
Ok; that clears a lot up.
Can you explain how “it hurts the puppy” is a moral fact? It seems to just be the actual result of kicking a puppy.
Quoting Leontiskos
Banno.
Quoting Leontiskos
This has not been clear to me. And having now gone back over the thread I see no fatal flaw - if the objection goes : person A is a moral realist and the objector (B) simply considers morality subjective; what’s the catch? What’s the fatality? (I note here I may be positing something I’ve not before… so if it seems a sidestep it’s not intentional).
If moral realism is merely the position that there are moral facts - and nothing more - I can’t see how it’s anything but raising taste or consensus to an erroneously untouchable status?
Where? That one ought not kick puppies for fun is an obvious moral truth, not a brute moral truth. I don't think you've grasped Banno's line.
Quoting AmadeusD
That's not an argument against moral realism. I said, "In different ways we have all been trying to show that the schema upon which the arguments against moral realism depend is fatally flawed."
When I said that moral anti-realists lost the day in this thread, my point was that the thread is about disproving moral realism, and the arguments have failed. The OP explicitly admitted that his arguments have failed in his new thread. You keep trying to shift the burden of proof. See:
Quoting Leontiskos
-
Quoting AmadeusD
I don't think it is. See: .
So, this is the crux of my issue. No, it's not an 'obvious moral truth'. It's just something a lot of people agree with. It isn't 'true' in any other sense than that it is widely accepted, as best i can tell. There's nothing truthful about it. I think if you're going to call something an 'obvious moral truth' something other than claiming it's an obvious moral truth needs to be involved. Tautology doesn't sit well with me, even if that's what this boils down to.
Quoting Leontiskos
Hmm. Noted, But, I don't see that they've failed. I see you describing what would rebut but I don't actually see this applied to any argument.
The fact that I don't see morality as truth-apt, and that no one can give me any reason to think it is other than 'it's obvious' seems to me, to put that assertion on extremely thin ground. What have i missed? What's the bumper-sticker for why moral realism survives that?
Quoting Leontiskos
Quote 1. If it is a fact that kicking a puppy hurts/harms the puppy, then that's just a fact of hte matter. So, that's not a further moral "fact" - it's an empirical fact subsequent to the act of kicking (which others are making a moral judgment on, rather than I). I ascribed no value to the harm/hurt (in fact, i think that might be what sets me on the anti-realist bent.. I do not see that it matters). Had I said that the harm is the wrong-maker, I could agree - but again, I don't see how the puppy being hurt imparts any truth to the initial statement.
Quote 2. Is him ascribing something to me which I don't think or feel but that may be explained by the above - I did not, and do not, believe the harm the puppy experiences is a fact that gives moral statements about kicking a puppy value or truth (morally speaking). It is just a fact (or, an effect).
Quote 3. Similar to above. I've never tried to prove that the fact of the puppy's harm would make it wrong or right. Though, it appears to me that's a result of my larger-scale misunderstanding being read as if i know what im talking about LOL. The only reason I was bringing up that underlying fact was because I was under the impression that i could apply the concept (that the statement is not brute) to the framework being used to allow 'One ought not kick puppies' being considered somehow 'true'. I don't think either that statement of itself, or the resulting harm/hurt impart 'truth' beyond it being empirically true that a puppy is hurt by being kicked.
The point here was not that you must believe it, but rather that Banno is not presenting it as a brute moral fact. He is presenting it as an obvious moral truth. Your argument above requires that he be presenting it as a brute moral fact.
Quoting AmadeusD
Well the OP admitted their arguments failed, so that's a pretty significant consideration.
Quoting AmadeusD
This is the shifting of the burden of proof that I spoke about. This thread is not about proving moral realism, and in fact no one has really tried to do that in any significant sense.
Quoting AmadeusD
Right. Never said you did. Again, the point is that, "It hurts the puppy," is not a moral fact, even though it could function as a non-moral premise in a moral syllogism.
Anyway, go do your work you procrastinator. :razz:
Ahhh. Okay. I see that. Thank you. Quoting Leontiskos
Okay.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is purely confusing. If the point is that it could serve as a non-moral fact, why would it be suggested it is a further moral fact? Is this, in fact, the debate?
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm home now. Its quarter to 7pm. Which is early for me tbf LOL. I prefer wasting away here, now that i've found it! Or the mats.
I think everyone has consistently maintained that it is not a moral fact! ...lol
When I said, "I don't think it is," I was saying, "I don't think it is a moral fact." Maybe I should have clipped the second sentence in your quote. ()
Quoting AmadeusD
Well have a good night. I'm out.
Where?
I do recall objecting to the word "brute" and suggesting "hinge" for some statements. I think "Brute" was introduced by @Michael; I might be wrong. For my part, I don't see that "one ought not kick puppies for fun" needs any justification. The problem with "brute" is that it carries some empiricist baggage.
I suppose In this, I see a defence of it being a moral fact.
Okay, at least through all my failings, that was my understanding of your position on it… at least I got that much lol.
Fair enough.
I provide a different explanation of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity here.
It's a complex issue. It cannot simply be addressed with aphorisms.
You said that one ought not kick the puppy because it hurts the puppy. How is this to be interpreted as anything other than you ascribing moral value to hurting the puppy?
By analogy, consider if someone were to say that one ought not kick the puppy because the puppy has brown fur. It is certainly true that the puppy has brown fur, but this has nothing to do with whether or not one ought not kick the puppy, and so the use of the term "because" here is fallacious.
If you only meant to say that one ought not kick the puppy and kicking the puppy would hurt the puppy then I wouldn't object. But of course this doesn't even address the issue of whether or not moral facts are brute facts, so it certainly doesn't rebut the claim that there are brute moral facts.
This feels like a narrow account of subjectivism that few would endorse.
In my view, people ultimately make moral judgements and decisions according to their own values and moral sense. These values and this sensibility are in turn informed by enculturation and group-think, but also by biologically based moral instincts (innate senses of fairness and justice, empathy), as well as individual experiences and preferences. This is "subjectivism" as none of these are objective features of the world (right?), but seems poorly captured by "if everyone were to say so".
Note that I said if. I didn't say only if.
In my estimation the account you gave in that post is the same account you gave in the post I responded to. I decided to respond to the earlier post because I thought it was a clearer case. My point was that, "The diamond is worth $1,000," is not made true by everyone saying so.
See:
Quoting Leontiskos
Still, I think @Michael's account of moral subjectivism is more plausible than any other account on offer in this thread, sans @AmadeusD's. Like 'subjective truth', 'moral subjectivism' is chimerical.
Quoting unenlightened
This to me is a good example of an anti-realist account. Morality is a conventionalized system devised to punishes uncooperative behavior and reinforce cooperative behavior. If moral claims are to be considered "true", they are only true in terms of this system.
Anti-naturalists like @Michael, @Banno, @Leontiskos have to demonstrate why accounts like this fail so utterly that, ontological parsimony be damned, it is preferable to introduce a whole new category of reality.
Great. You think it's "chimerical". Wow. Everyone take note, Leontiskos thinks moral subjectivism is chimerical.
Like so many of your "devastating critiques" or whatever you like to call them, this is empty of content.
Buddy, are you just a troll? Feel free to go back into the thread and read the arguments, and do some actual philosophy for once.
If you don't think the worth of a diamond is a good example then consider the rules of chess. We can change them by collective decision. Can we change moral rules by collective decision?
"Socially advantageous behaviour is morally right" does not seem to be a tautology. If it's not a tautology then the meaning of "morally right" cannot be reduced to "socially advantageous behaviour".
See Moore's open question argument:
It may be factually correct that socially advantageous behaviour is morally right, but realist metaethics may still be correct: that socially advantageous behaviour is morally right is objectively true, even if we were all to believe otherwise, and for the non-naturalist that moral rightness is a non-natural property of socially advantageous behaviour.
I don't think we can change moral rules by collective decision. I don't know if anyone believes that...? I am not following you here.
Moral subjectivists might. They might argue that moral rules are the collectively decided rules of social behaviour (if not simply an individual's own chosen rules).
Okay, I see. I think this goes back to my voting example. If we all agree that X is morally wrong, does that agreement make X morally wrong? Either it is morally wrong because we agreed on it, or else we agreed on it because it is morally wrong. Such equivocations seem to always be present, in this case on the term "morally wrong." It begins as one thing in the voting phase, and it transforms into a different thing in the consensus phase.
Or more concisely: positive laws can be immoral.
According to moral subjectivism, yes, hence what I said before:
1. It would not be wrong to eat babies if everyone were to say so (subjectivism), or
2. It would be wrong to eat babies even if everyone were to say otherwise (realism)
So are moral rules like physical laws (realism) or like the rules of chess (subjectivism)?
Despite @Banno's comments there is more to the issue than simply whether or not some moral sentences are true. There are further considerations to be had.
It's my anti-antirealism. The reality is that communication happens, and is advantageous, and can only happen in a largely truth-telling community. The summary of these facts is that one ought to be honest, because otherwise communication ceases, language is useless, and society collapses. This a physical reality.
That might be because "Such-and-such is socially advantageous behaviour" is a third-person perspective and "such-and-such is morally wrong" is a first person perspective.
Imagine you are an alien anthropologist observing the hairless apes of earth. You conclude that their moral conventions are a socially advantageous strategy designed to foster cooperation. This account in no way requires that the apes themselves take this view. To them, morality might seem primordial, and there may even be philosopher-apes who formalize this perception.
But what does this have to do with morality? There can be non-moral obligations. I ought to brush my teeth otherwise they will fall out, but it's not immoral to not brush my teeth (although it may be immoral to subject others to my foul breath).
There's something missing in your argument to connect socially advantageous behaviour with morality.
We are arguing over whether moral subjectivism is a coherent position, or whether subjective truth is a coherent concept. If we change the rules of chess then we are playing a different game. Calling it "chess" is misleading. If we speak about consensus, then we are not speaking about morality. Else, if "morality" is nothing more than consensus, then how could one cast a vote in the first place, before the consensus? Consensus-"morality" is something like positive law, and I think everyone recognizes that positive law is not the same thing as morality.
Again, "Either it is morally wrong because we agreed on it, or else we agreed on it because it is morally wrong." Is the pre-consensus vote pre-moral?
This is ambiguous. It may be that our moral beliefs are consistent with socially advantageous strategies designed to foster cooperation, but it doesn't then follow that socially advantageous strategies designed to foster cooperation are moral. Our beliefs may be wrong.
Well this isn't true. The FIDE rules of chess last changed in January of this year to add a seventy-five move rule.
Quoting Leontiskos
Some moral subjectivists disagree. They argue that that is exactly what morality is. See contractualism.
No, no. This was my (highly likely to be) misguided approach to enumerating hte opposing position. I was intimating that the fact that you could say "Well, no, your claim must necessarily rest on the harm caused by the kicking being considered bad/immoral" as though it was a rebuttal to the position that the flat claim that kicking puppies is wrong is a brute fact. It was wrong to do so, but that the kciking is wrong because of hte harm was never my personal claim. I don't really think the harm matters, personally. But again, this is a result of my talking out of school at almost every turn here.
Quoting Michael
That is my position. I can't recognize an aspect of hte act which would 'prove' the truth of it being bad or good.
Quoting Michael
Yeah, and this is the mistake i was making, likely leading the misunderstanding above. However, i actually only meant to say the second part. That it is a fact that kicking the puppy will hurt it. I wasn't saying kicking the puppy is wrong for either the reason of claiming it's wrong, or that it hurts the puppy.
And yes, I was wrong. My point was that if the claim "kicking puppies is wrong" must rest on a deeper fact viz. that it will hurt hte puppy, then it's not a brute fact. I actually haven't entirely given up this line but only out of lack of progress. I don't believe the puppy being hurt is a wrong-making necessarily so it's not a deeper 'moral' fact on my account - but I guess it's hard to say with certainty that i actually think that is the case rather than it 'seems wrong to count a fact of hte matter as a moral fact'
Leontiskos has very well dispossessed of the notion that this matters. It merely defeats that one single claim (if true).
Yes it is, but I am not going to argue that right now. But you ought not argue that it is not immoral to lie, because you are undermining your own argument when you do so. Your bullshit undermines this site; It is a performative contradiction. It is not immoral for a-social beings like the cat that walks by himself to lie. It is immoral for humans to do so. And also in the quoted post, I indicate that it is not immoral for a stick insect to pretend to its predator to be stick. because they are not in a social mutual relationship. But humans are.
Only if the rules of a game do not constitute the game would this argument succeed. That seems highly implausible.
Quoting Michael
But you haven't answered my central contention about circularity. If morality is nothing more than consensus, then the origins of the consensus (the votes) are non-moral (or pre-moral). I don't have a problem with the idea that consensus carries moral weight, but I believe the circularity argument proves that morality cannot be simply reduced to consensus. If a consensus of 10 votes carries moral weight, then so does a single vote. The moral weight can't just materialize out of nowhere upon the reaching of a consensus.
The incoherence is going to be especially problematic in a democratic age, where majoritarianism and morality are more clearly distinguished.
I agree with @Michael. "Society ought not collapse" is not a physical reality.
Are you saying that the rules didn't change? Because they did. That's simply indisputable.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't understand what's circular about it? The people who invented chess dictated the original rules. FIDE recently dictated some new changes. Governments across the world enact new laws every day. Why can't it be that moral rules work the same way?
I mean, you're making an argument from authority. "The chess foundation said so, so it must be true." I think this chess tangent is a dead end. This is about the ontology of chess, and ontological questions are not settled by authorities.
Quoting Michael
How can it be simultaneously true that, "It is morally wrong because we agreed on it," and, "We agreed on it because it is morally wrong"? You have to pick one or the other. How could the votes that constitutes the consensus themselves be non-moral?
Nor by algorithms. Again, if a moral theory were to advocate some horror, it is open for us to reject that moral theory on that basis. So, to take on a biblical example, the Binding of Isaac can be seen as child abuse, sufficient to rule out Abraham as a moral authority. (, hence "faith", especially in some authority, is morally questionable.)
They are if the ontology of chess is such that the rules are dictated by some relevant authority, which they are. Cavemen didn't just discover the rules of chess one day.
Quoting Leontiskos
I did. Moral subjectivists say it's the former.
On what grounds do you justify this assertion? It seems to beg the question.
And what happens when two people disagree over whether or not something is a "horror" (e.g. with abortion or the death penalty for murderers)?
If the nature of chess is dictated by an authority, then it is not the result of a general consensus. A vote and an appeal to an authority are two different things. Thus your chess case, as presented, is not a matter of consensus.
Quoting Michael
Then the votes that constitute the consensus are themselves non-moral, and this is absurd. If a consensus of votes have moral weight, then the individual votes also have moral weight. The notion that the consensus has moral weight and the votes have none is incoherent. Your contractualism article actually admits this and tries to wrestle with it.
On this account, our moral beliefs and intuitions are an expression of this cooperative system. To ask, "but what if they are *wrong*?", independently of the system, is to reintroduce moral realism, which this account leaves no room for.
Simply on the grounds of logic. If the consequence of an argument is unacceptable, it is open to us to reject the argument. That's how reductio works.
I think you're being overly pedantic here. In the case of chess there was a majority consensus amongst the group authorized to decide the laws. In the case of laws there is a majority consensus amongst the legislature. In the case of morality it may be that there is a majority consensus amongst the general population.
There's nothing inherently contradictory about these positions.
Unacceptable to who? You and I might disagree over whether or not abortion, eating meat, and the death penalty are unacceptable.
Right, I edited to say "general consensus." The consensus of a non-elected or non-representative body is an authority in a way that excludes the sort of general consensus we are considering.
If moral realism is correct then it is perfectly appropriate to ask "what if they're wrong?"
So to simply use this example of socially advantageous behaviour as a refutation of realism is to beg the question.
This shows, yet again, that what you are calling "antirealism" is not what the rest of us are calling antirealism. Nothing in the story here is incompatible with realism. We may well have "conventionalized system devised to punishes uncooperative behavior and reinforce cooperative behavior", and yet it is still open to us to ask if such a system is indeed moral.
This is from Moore, it's called the Open Question Argument, and it leads to one of the central discussions of Ethics, the Naturalistic Fallacy.
So what.
Agreement is not a criteria here. The open question argument shows that.
I am not following whatever it is you are doing.
Cool! Fuck off and die, then.
I agree. This is a point that I have <pounded> before, and I think it's actually one of the most widespread problems on this forum.
Quoting Banno
So even if I were to disagree with Banno on this, he would not be begging the question or committing any logical faux pas. Reductio's can act on systems, including moral systems.
You said that "if the consequence of an argument is unacceptable, it is open to us to reject the argument."
So you offer an argument for some morality with a consequence that I find unacceptable, so I reject it.
I offer an argument for some morality with a consequence that you find unacceptable, so you reject it.
We've gotten nowhere. How do we determine which of us is, if either, is right? Is moral philosophy simply a futile endeavour?
I'll take your moral indignation as a sign that there is an implicit 'ought' in your account. :wink:
Quoting Michael
Banno's point is that the common element in moral realism is that there are true moral statements. It turns out to be important that the SEP article on moral realism stops there, noting that "...some accounts of moral realism see it as involving additional commitments", while the SEP article on Moral Antirealism - the one you repeatedly refer to - needs these "additional commitments' in order to implement a critique of "moral realism".
Could it be that without these "additional commitments" moral realism stands firm? I think so.
There is no moral indignation. Just the end of communication.
And I suppose "fuck off" is not a normative utterance? :roll:
The virtue of this account is that it fully explains our moral notions, without need of some separate ontological category. Introducing it anyway is simply gratuitous. It does not explain anything additional that is not already explained without it.
Of course. Are you expecting mere philosophical considerations will decide what you ought to do? They might help you phrase the issues, but they will no more solve all your moral quandaries than they will tell you the value of the gravitational constant.
I suspected this would finally provide a divergence in our opinions...
You seem to view the distinction as:
1. Moral non-cognitivism
2. Error theory
3. Moral realism
Others view the distinction as:
1. Moral non-cognitivism
2. Error theory
3a. Moral subjectivism
3b. Moral realism
When others argue against moral realism they are arguing against their (3b), not your (3). Your (3) also allows for their (3a).
So you're just talking past each other.
And it's poverty is that it fails completely to tell us what we ought to do.
It's not even in the game, let alone a winning move.
I'm expecting philosophical considerations to help me determine what "one ought not" means and whether or not moral truths are determined to any extent by human attitudes and decisions.
You seem to be confusing metaethics and normative ethics. I have no questions for normative ethics. I already know what I ought to (not) do. Don't eat babies, for example.
I am glad the positions have now scrambled a bit. The thread was becoming dull before that.
But a common interpretation of Akedah (The Binding) is that Abraham was morally problematic, inclined to child sacrifice as was common at the time, and that God was acting as pedagogue, pulling out the weed by exposing the deepest rot. So I don't mind your claim that Abraham is no moral exemplar. :razz:
I think I might have already mentioned once or twice that my interest here was no more than to show that there are moral truths.
A mere pleasantry. Are you expecting honesty, rationality, or good sense? Reject my argument, but don't then complain when you see the consequences.
The idea is that all of our notions of morality, of what is and isn't moral, are themselves are a part of this system. There is no sense of asking if something is moral independently of this system any more than asking about chess rules independently of the rules of chess.
Quoting Banno
And I thought it turned out that what you were calling "realism" was not what the rest of us were calling realism.
Yes, it is a metaethical claim, not an ethical one.
And as I have already mentioned, the rest of us are interested in further considerations. We want to know if moral truths are expressions of individual attitudes, or if they describe conventions of social behaviour, or if they report on facts about the world that obtain even if everyone were to believe otherwise. We want to know whether or not moral truths are reducible to natural phenomena.
If you're not interested in these further considerations then you don't need to engage with the rest of us who are.
:ok:
How odd. These are not mutually exclusive.
Quoting Michael
The discussion of the open question and direction of fit shows that they are not natural phenomena.
:rofl: :rofl:
Quoting Banno
You've already hit rock bottom buddy.
You are assuming that (3a) is coherent, but when presented with the incoherencies of (3a) you only said, "Well it's like chess." Instead of addressing the morality question you sought to address a chess question, and I don't think it was persuasive. ()
I love this. A case in point for my ever-lowering expectations.
Can you give us an example of a moral truth that is not a truth?
There is a great quote to this effect in the Magna Moralia by Aristotle (or whoever wrote it). I couldn't find it. :nerd:
---
In any case, meta-ethics has an effect on ethics. In fact we often argue about ethics via meta-ethics nowadays.
From someone who thinks dishonesty will lead to the collapse of society? Yes, in fact. :grin:
(I agree, by the way.)
The distinction is only problematic when someone takes it to be hard-and-fast.
I don't think you have presented any incoherencies.
See:
Quoting Leontiskos
Are you committed to the proposition that, on the version of moral subjectivism you are examining, the consensus has moral weight and the votes have none?
Oops, I somehow misread that as "all moral claims are true".
Anyway, instead of being an asshole, why don't you tell me what was wrong with my previous post? Or not.
It's arsehole.
What I am saying is that there are certain behaviours that society has deemed acceptable and certain behaviours that society has deemed unacceptable. According to some moral subjectivists when we talk about morality we are talking about these socially acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. The sentence "murder is immoral" is true iff society deems murder unacceptable because "murder is immoral" just means "murder is deemed socially unacceptable."
This may be factually incorrect (e.g. if Moore's open argument is sound), but that doesn't make it incoherent. It's an internally consistent theory even if it mistakes the meaning of moral sentences.
And on a similar vein, the same is true for the subjectivists who claim that "murder is immoral" is true (for me) if I disapprove of murder because "murder is immoral" just means "I disapprove of murder". It's internally consistent even if factually incorrect.
Do you just fling insults when you've got nothing better to say?
No - I also fling insults when I have something to say.
Quoting hypericin
Which previous post? There are so many.
So for you subjectivism is coherent but wrong.
For others it is incoherent because in being a response to moral issues it pretends to tell us what we ought to do, and yet it only tells us what most people do.
Looks like it was the one where I said that @unenlightened claim was metaethical.
Absurd, right? Do tell.
The distinction which right here you seem to have no clue about:
Quoting Banno
Moral subjectivism isn't a "response to moral issues", it is a metaethical theory.
It doesn't "pretend to tell us what we ought to do", nor does it "tell us what most people do", it is a statement on the nature of moral claims.
Quoting hypericin
where "It" is
Quoting hypericin
the account claiming
Quoting hypericin
and the story of the monkey.
the point that both @Michael and I have made is that the account is an example of the naturalistic fallacy, as shown by the open question argument. I used the line that it's not a winning move because it's not even in the game.
But it seems you didn't notice this critique for what it is. I put that down to your probably not being familiar with the background.
So here it is again, in small words: that we do cooperate does not imply that we ought cooperate.
"Yes, it is a metaethical claim, not an ethical one."
Was a response to
"And it's poverty is that it fails completely to tell us what we ought to do."
Which is a nonsensical requirement of a metaethical claim. All your obfuscation to the side.
The naturalistic fallacy is a response to ethical naturalism, how does it even apply to moral anti-realism, or subjective realism?
I think you're a rude troll that isn't a fraction as clever or knowledgeable as you pretend. Kindly "piss off".
I didn't introduce naturalism in to the conversation - you did in the example you borrowed. So if it's irrelevant, that's down to you.
Quoting hypericin
Cheers. You'll be sending me the hemlock, then?
You are under no obligation to post here.
Okay, thanks. My problem with this is that morality is a normative affair. If someone is making purely descriptive claims, then they are not engaged in, or committing themselves to, any kind of morality. If someone claims that morality is reducible to descriptive facts, then they are explaining away morality.* Either way, there is a significant equivocation on the term 'morality.' If someone mistakes the meaning of a moral sentence by failing to understand that, for example, "murder is immoral" involves a claim about whether one ought murder, then they are substituting an equivocal sense of "immoral."
There is a common confusion and category error between theories about "morality", and moral theories. Only the latter involves true normativity. There is moral subjectivism as a theory about "morality," and then there is moral subjectivism as a moral theory. I have argued against the latter; you are proposing the former. I don't think it is incoherent to say that every moral claim is about societal expectations (but I do think it is wrong). Similarly, I wouldn't think it incoherent to say that every moral claim is really about the lengths of different giraffes' necks. Neither one is incoherent in the sense of self-defeating. But I do think it is incoherent to appeal to these sort of claims while at the same time espousing a moral theory (i.e. a normative theory).
The relevance here is that folks in this thread either are, or else are flirting with, espousing normative theories. That sort of "subjectivism" is incoherent. The other sort just fails to understand that morality pertains to oughtness.
* Ethical naturalism aside
No, you're no Socrates, I'm afraid.
I agree that faith in an authority is questionable. The Euthyphro demonstrates the difficulty there -- faith in an authority can serve as a kind of way of passing the moral buck to someone else when you're always responsible for how you act regardless of the faith you place: faith soothes, but does it justify?
The Binding of Isaac is such a good moral story to me because I grew up with it. Johannes de silentio's doubt doesn't end in aporia for me but it's still a very popular story with enough valances of meaning to keep it alive and contemplate. I suppose it comes to mind because I'd say that the commitment to non-violence strikes me as something of a heavenly belief, whereas the acceptance of violence in this world, when necessary, strikes me as an earthly belief. In metaphor The Binding of Isaac can be read as this tension between heavenly and earthly commitments: the first born son inherits the wealth and guarantees that you have a legacy, so to sacrifice your first-born is to put faith back in God that your legacy is greater because of him and that he will keep his promise to you -- that is, the ethics of today, which Kierkegaard clearly felt, were so alien then that killing your son wasn't even something morally worth considering. Instead: There are the goods of this world and then the goods of the higher world that God knows, and only he knows, and it's only through faith that you can reach them even when you do not understand him.
I reach for faith because it seems right, and rhetorically at least it seems to imply anti-realism. So it fits how I feel, at least. Further I wonder if there may be points of consonance here between what are usually competing worldviews or ethical considerations -- if it's all faith then perhaps this is a path to talking.
Quoting Banno
That makes sense -- it's a sort of literature for this purpose of working on myself, and surely all this is real.
1. X is wrong
2. One ought not X
Do these mean the same thing?
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't think that this is necessarily the case. There is a normative component to the rules of chess and to laws even though these are manufactured. I don't see a problem with claiming that society has manufactured (organically over time) a set of rules that each member must abide by, and that these are the rules we talk about when we talk about morality.
See my second paragraph above.
There are many apologies for Abraham's behaviour. Seen at face value, he was morally culpable.
Quoting Michael
Sure. We do cooperate. Yet it remains open as to whether we ought cooperate. There are moral issues unaddressed by naturalism.
hypericin, you're just out of line. No one here is being as escalating or trollish as you are. You continually misread posts in order to take offense, and then sound off like a loose canon. See:
Quoting hypericin
See also:
Quoting hypericin
That was in response to a post where I agreed with your position with respect to Michael's consensus-based subjectivism, and then noted that Michael's attempt is not altogether bad, along with AmadeusD's. You seem to have taken umbrage as if I were calling you out, but I don't even consider your theory moral subjectivism. I consider it non-cognitivism. You think system-based moral claims are truth-apt and supra-systematic claims (or axiom claims) are not truth-apt. Given that the foundations of the system are the most important issue, this is non-cognitivism in my eyes.
(The "chimerical" comment was a reference to the arguments in my previous post to Michael)
Is it open as to whether we ought not move a pawn backwards in chess when playing chess?
As a non-philosopher with a secular orientation, I've generally assumed morality simply referred to a culturally held (intersubjective) code of conduct (where, naturally, there are many outliers and dissenters). We have internalized or incorporated this intersubjectivity to the point where many of the principles have become oughts in a substantive emotional sense. Nevertheless it seems that many people who hold that killing is wrong don't object to killing men, women and children for the sake of territory, politics or religion, or for some different understanding of a 'greater good.' I now understand that I am a moral realist because I hold the position that we shouldn't cause suffering and should try to minimize it. But the interesting part for me in the ought business is the justification.
Quoting Michael
Which supports a view that morality is fluid and constantly open to change. Today's outliers are tomorrow's conservatives.
Yup, I agree. I also do not agree with the apologies -- when I say that Fear and Trembling doesn't end in aporia for me, I side with the conclusion that Abraham was a moral monster.
The interesting part for me is the very meaning of obligation. I think Anscombe said it best when she described "ought" as "a word of mere mesmeric force".
I think they are both normative; they are both "ought"-claims. By "descriptive" I am thinking of the "is" in the is-ought distinction. It is the complement of normative.
Quoting Michael
Right, understood. But morality is not conceived of as a voluntary activity, whereas chess is. "Pawns cannot move backwards," and, "Babies cannot be eaten," are not the same, because the former only holds given a prior decision to play chess. The latter is not like that.
Again, it's not clear to me what it is you are suggesting, both in that post and in your recent line of thought.
Ethics is difficult - intractable - to the point of there perhaps being no solution; after all, why must there be an answer to "what should we do"?
We can choose to abandon society.
But rather than chess, perhaps laws a good example. We ought to obey the law, and not just for practical reasons.
And yet sometimes we ought not obey the law. It's never simple.
When playing chess one ought follow the rules and when going about your everyday life one ought obey the law, even though the rules of chess and the law are manufactured by us.
Perhaps there's nothing more to morality than those socially manufactured rules that we impose on one another.
Right, but I touched on this earlier when I mentioned positive law and its relation to morality. The common opinion is that a law can be immoral. Further, and more importantly, the law example runs head-on into the circularity objection (). I admit that law is part of morality, but not that it is the whole of morality. I don't think consensus can describe morality in its entirety. See:
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, sometimes some other rule demands us to break the law. And perhaps this other rule is yet another manufactured rule. I can understand the moral subjectivist taking issue with the claim that there are rules that are simply "built in" to the world (or whatever it is that (robust) moral realists believe).
Rules without a rule-giver does seem spurious.
I think Anscombe sums up the problem. We can never manufacture binding rules for ourselves. Self-legislation does not bind:
Apart from , so far in this thread we haven't treated of the existential break, the actuality of choice. And it's this that in the end breaks the rule of law. We each still must act.
See:
Quoting Banno
When pressed why, he gave his usual confused gibberish. I have a negative history with him over several discussions.
With you, I may have misconstrued you as dismissing my view on ethics because subjectivism is "chimerical" (I think its subjectivism, but the borders between these "isms" get blurry). This combined with some mounting frustration with you, and what I felt was an arrogant, dismissive attitude, your victory laps... But, this happens, these kind of frictions sometimes build in the course of a discussion. I apologize, you didn't deserve that.
Well, I know lawmakers like to think themselves above the law, but they're not.
I think it an indisputable fact that society does in fact dictate rules that each member must follow.
Whether or not these are the rules that we refer to when we talk about morality is the very issue that (robust) moral realists and moral subjectivists disagree on. Realists think that moral rules are something other than the rules society manufactures for itself, subjectivists don't.
And error theorists agree with the realist that when we talk about morality we intend to talk about something other than the rules society manufactures for itself, but agree with the subjectivist that there are no such other rules.
:lol:
Thanks.
Those who make laws for themselves don't need to break laws when they can simply change them, or grant themselves a dispensation, or something like that. This problem becomes painfully obvious when, say, a U.S. president is impeached.
Quoting Michael
I think the circularity objection stands (). Again, go back to my distinction between a theory about "morality," and a moral theory (). You are now moving back into "moral theory" territory for subjectivism. You're not just saying, "Morality is just the laws we pass;" you are saying, "Morality is the laws we pass and we ought to obey those laws." You're moving back into the normative territory, and that is precisely what my circularity objection addresses.
[url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7587/anscombes-modern-moral-philosophy/p1]Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy"
[/url]
This remains for me the central and most troubling article in Ethics. It's what drove me to virtue ethics.
Not exactly. I'm saying that society says "you ought not kill babies" and then we either obey or we don't, and if we don't then we're doing what society says we ought not do. Moral subjectivists claim that there is nothing more to morality than this. According to them, when we say "you ought not kill babies" we are implicitly (or explicitly) saying "according to society you ought not kill babies."
Moral realists, on the other hand, think that "you ought not kill babies" is never prefixed with some "according to X". Moral subjectivists think this nonsensical as they believe one cannot have a rule without a rule-giver.
Yep. It's a tough nut to crack. I sometimes think I've overcome it but of course doubts always remain when it comes to Anscombe. Granted, I have less at stake than you do. :wink:
I'll join Philippa Foot in changing my mind every couple of years.
1. "one ought not harm another" means "society says one ought not harm another"
2. "society says one ought not harm another" is true iff society says one ought not harm another
3. Therefore, "one ought not harm another" is true iff society says one ought not harm another
The argument is valid.
Moral realists (and error theorists) believe that (1) is false, whereas (some) moral subjectivists believe that (1) is true.
Hah. What is the "modus tollens" reading, or the logical implication that you have in mind? I couldn't find that reference in the SEP article you link to in your thread.
This is the reason for my discomfort with the idea of moral truth.
Perhaps there are moral truths because there is a rule-giver, e.g. society.
Huh...the buggers have updated the SEP page since then.
Quoting Banno
Here's the archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190311014303/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/anscombe/#VirEth
Now I'll have to re-read the SEP article.
For sure. I wrestle with it a lot - I guess i see society as an arbitrary rule-giver. Assenting to just plum majority rule does not sit well.
Sure, then we're back to a theory of "morality," and you're safe again! Of course your claim here does seem to run up against your earlier claim, "We ought to obey the law, and not just for practical reasons." ().
Quoting Michael
Okay, I'm not sure I agree with this but I'm going to leave it to the side.
Quoting Michael
Valid and coherent, but it erroneously divorces morality from oughtness, as noted above. Society saying something does not intrinsically obligate anyone to obey. This seems like Unenlightened's claim, where the moral premise is tacit and yet denied. I think a theory is either normative or else it is not, and there's no use trying to straddle the line and be both. But if you are here propounding a non-normative theory then I accede.
Quoting Michael
Okay, agreed.
I wondered about that.
There's a difference between some moral statements being true and there being some incontestable moral laws. Realism does not imply that there are moral principles carved in stone. It's just that morality is open to rational discussion, that it's more than just competing preferences.
Plus there's no fact about which rules you've been following all this time. Augustine's solution: Love and do what you will.. No need for a rule-giver. No need for rules at all.
Understood and thanks for bumper-stickering it.
I suppose my position on that is that, I don't think it's open to rational discussion in terms of establishing moral rules - But i think competing preferences are open to being judged as more or less reasonable. I just don't think you could say any conclusion is 'right' or 'true' unless there's something to back-stop the claim other than just discussion - though, I personally think that's enough tobe getting on with
Is there such a thing as a non-arbitrary rule giver?
I thought they might have.
Quoting Banno
No, I tend to think Anscombe was wrong about (1). Aquinas didn't read Aristotle the way Anscombe reads him in that article, and her thesis cuts against the grain of Catholic thought. But it's not altogether easy to circumvent her argument. Kant's attempt is perhaps the most famous, but it is also convoluted and probably wrong. Her article probably bothers me as much as it does you.
These are difficult debates and I would have to review the literature. Also, I have come to these questions from the perspective of Catholic philosophy and you have come to them from the perspective of more secular philosophy, so translation is required. In any case, Catholics tend to hold that a substantial version of morality can be attained without believing in God. Protestants would be likely to disagree.
If the argument is valid and if the premises are true then the conclusion that one ought not harm another iff society says one ought not ham another is true.
Quoting Leontiskos
What exactly do you mean by “intrinsic”? Isn’t this the very thing that realists and subjectivists disagree over? Realists say that moral rules and obligations are “intrinsic” (i.e objective) and subjectivists say that they aren’t.
If so then it’s begging the question to argue that moral subjectivism is false (or incoherent) if it entails that moral rules and obligations are not intrinsic.
You appear to just be saying that subjectivism fails because it isn’t realism.
Yes, but (1) is false.
Quoting Michael
I am speaking about sufficiency. "Society said so, therefore I ought to obey," is a false statement.
knows why. A further premise is required to get to the consequent. For example, "The societal rulers are ordained by God, . . . therefore I must obey." An extrinsic normativity or authority must be applied to society, for it does not possess it in itself.
Quoting Michael
The funny thing about your defenses of moral subjectivism is that the self-proclaimed subjectivists in this thread have consistently disagreed with them, and along the same lines that I have. I find it curious, although certainly not definitive. In any case, this claim of yours falls flat in light of that fact.
That’s where realists and subjectivists disagree.
Subjectivism claims that (1) is true, and if (1) is true then the conclusion follows. Subjectivism allows for obligations. It just doesn’t allow for realist obligations, which is obvious given that it’s anti-realist.
With each other as well as the Papists.
Well, not quite. You said something similar and I already agreed. You said:
Quoting Michael
Note, "some." Two self-proclaimed subjectivists in this thread have already disagreed with (1), and none have agreed with it.
Quoting Michael
If (1) is true then subjectivism allows for obligations. Everyone here seems to be in agreement that (1) is false, including you. This seems about right to me. This is the case that I would call obviously false but not incoherent.
Yes, subjectivism covers a variety of different positions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_subjectivism
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/moral-anti-realism/
I was simply using an example that better fits my breakdown here.
Well that’s the issue. I think that (1) is false, I think that some moral sentences are true, and I think that obligations without a rule-giver are nonsensical. Yet these three positions are incompatible.
Perhaps I’m a fictionalist.
I take theistic theories of morality to take such as given.
My consistent point throughout has been that "moral subjectivism" doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Some versions are incoherent, others are plainly false. Even in the literature and SEP I don't see much representation for this position. I think you have made a bit of progress showing that there are versions which are false, but not incoherent. Fair enough?
---
Quoting Michael
They're not incompatible. Convert! Make straight the way! :grin:
That's interesting, though. Is there an implicit atheistic premise, here? Or is that baked in as a rejection of divine command theory or something like it?
(To clarify any confusion, my position is that morality is overdetermined, being derivable in both a religious and non-religious manner.)
Are the determinations compatible across each sector of assessment?
I would be interested to hear a moral theory that comports with a religion, and an atheist, naturalistic world-view.
1. Some "one ought not X" is true
2. "one ought not X" doesn't mean "according to some rule-giver Y, one ought not X"
3. There are no obligations without a rule-giver
These cannot all be true. It seems to me that non-cognitivists and error theorists must reject (1), subjectivists must reject (2), and realists must reject (3).
Yes, but the "range" is not entirely overlapping. Specifically, there are some religious moral truths that are not accessible to natural reason.
Quoting AmadeusD
Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition enunciate such a theory. I don't think I will raise it in these forums any time soon, but you could read around that tradition. (Or Augustine, or Maimonides' Jewish version, or Averroes' and Avicenna's Islamic version)
Sure. Note that your (2) here is a bit different from (1) up above.
So yeah, you've got a logical tension there. I personally reject (3) outright (), but I also think morality has a transcendent aspect or ...augmentation, so maybe I could leave (2) as well.
The thread on Anscombe that started four years ago is about (3), and might make for a fruitful discussion.
Quoting Michael
Agreed.
Quoting Michael
As I noted above, I don't think this is right. Presumably self-legislation would be rule-giving, even though I agree with Anscombe that this approach doesn't work. And apparently some subjectivists think law, such as a king's decree, would be legitimate.
Quoting Michael
I don't really understand why this would be true, but I don't want to get off onto too many tangents...
I understand the little i do of Maimonides (and Spinoza) through a psychiatrist trying to treat the Jewish Patriarch stories from a psychological perspective - he finds much agreement in their work.
Aquinas I understood (obviously as the originator of Thomism in some sense) to require faith for his moral system. If i'm wrong - neat! Should be fun to go through.
Contrarian folk. Sort of like philosophers.
I did find a link to the archived article on the SEP site itself if you wanted to use it for that thread: https://plato.stanford.edu/Archives/win2021/entries/anscombe/
(I assume this is the same one)
It has been a serious failing of mine to have waltz right over Aristotle. I took Plato, then Aurelius.
I will purchase a complete works of Aristotle this week - mark my words! Or don't. Not at issue :D
Well that's ambitious! Don't let me deter you, but if you want to start slow I would recommend his Nicomachean Ethics, which has become the go-to ethical text in Aristotle's corpus.
Thread put me in mind of this once you mentioned him. Nice. Thank you :)
That's a very interesting observation which I mainly share. In the West, a history of divine command theory, linking morality to compliance and hellfire, via a foundational guarantee from a magic man with anger management issues, has probably messed with our thinking.
:snicker:
Hilarious, when your posts pointing out my "silly mistakes" have been rats nests of mistakes.
Quoting Leontiskos
I keep seeing this mistake. Banno also makes it when he says "that we do cooperate does not imply that we ought cooperate."
You are confusing metaethical theories for ethical ones. A metaethical theory, unlike an ethical theory, is under no obligation to itself be ethically compelling. That is because it is claiming what ethics is, not what you ought to do. The fact might be that ethics originates from something that is not ethical at all.
For instance, suppose someone proposed that all ethical reasoning was instinctual. You might agree or disagree, but you can't say, "just because I have instincts doesn't mean I should obey them". The theory isn't saying that. It says, when you moralize, you are following instincts. Its just the fact of the matter, nothing to do with what you ought to do.
And you can't escape it. If the theory were true, and you say, "well, then I am under no obligation to be ethical, since I have no obligation to follow my instincts", the ethical reasoning which led you to reject instincts as a suitable ground for ethical reasoning would itself be instinctual.
Do you see the difference?
But the consequence, and the take away from Anscombe, is that the only workable option is to improve where on can. I'm working on being kind to fools. It's not easy.
I think we're primarily considering the notion of moral obligation in this discussion. Are there moral obligations and if so then what is their ontological status?
Assuming that a moral sentence is a sentence of the form "one ought (not) X":
a) no moral sentence is truth-apt
b) some moral sentence is truth-apt
Either (a) or (b) is true.
c) no moral sentence is true
d) some moral sentence is true
If (b) is true then either (c) or (d) is true.
e) no moral sentence is true if nobody believes so
f) some moral sentence is true even if nobody believes so
If (d) is true then either (e) or (f) is true.
Therefore, one of these is true:
a) no moral sentence is truth-apt (non-cognitivism)
c) no moral sentence is true (error theory)
e) no moral sentence is true if nobody believes so (non-objectivism)
f) some moral sentence is true even if nobody believes so (robust realism)
So given that a moral sentence is a sentence of the form "one ought (not) X", which of (a), (c), (e), or (f) is true?
I think it's worth looking at this
It would be wrong to assert (1) and begging the question to assert (2) in this case. So I take it that you are asserting (3)?
Even if (3) were true it doesn't then follow that one ought not eat babies. Something can be true and implausible.
So if Neanderthals engaged in cannibalism, you would say that was immoral? I'm just asking for the sake of understanding your position.
This is a very clear layout of the possibilities (though it must seem quite "convolute" to our poor @Banno).
But why is it a response to my post? Was it just the term "moral reasoning"? If I replace it with "moral obligation" I don't know that anything would change otherwise.
Most moral realists throughout history didn't have to consider morality for animals because they didn't realize that we emerged from an evolutionary chain. We evolved from an animal that looked like a squirrel, and it evolved ultimately from archaic cells that developed a relationship with mitochondria.
So if it's a continuum, and the archeological record shows that it is, how does moral realism work? Is it immoral for black widow spiders to eat their mates? I think the obvious answer is: no. It's not.
That means we're stuck with this: X is immoral for us. The challenge to moral realism is in asking about what's moral for homo habilis, or homo erectus. They're human. Are they us? Or not? The answer is going to be somewhat artificial, which means morality is artificial.
Because your post was saying that Banno and Leontiskos are making a mistake in asking about obligations, whereas I think obligations are the very thing we're discussing.
Are sentences like "one ought not X" true and if so are they true even if we all believe otherwise?
This discussion is on meta-ethics, not descriptive ethics, and your post seems to be discussing the latter.
That's a challenge for some theory on normative ethics (e.g. utilitarianism, hedonism, etc.). Moral realism is a theory on meta-ethics and so it doesn't need to answer this question.
Cannibalism was just an example. The question is: is morality only for humans? The idea is that if morality is only for homo sapiens, then morality is artificial because there's an ancestral continuum between humans and their forebears.
If morality is artificial, then moral realism fails.
Certainly not descriptive ethics. If you don't like my instinct example, go with your version of moral subjectivism:
"One ought do X" is true when everyone believes it's true.
It is not a valid objection to say "Why ought I do something just because everyone believes I should?".
Because it is not an ethical theory that says "You ought to do what everyone believes you should".
It is a metaethical theory that says "The truth of ethical propositions arises from everyone's belief in them".
Raising an ethical objection to a metaethical theory is a mistake. Because it is an is theory, not an ought theory, even though its subject is ought statements.
Please be kind to yourself.
Now, now, boys....
Your article continues "The usual explanations of reductio fail to acknowledge the full extent of its range of application.'
You said
Quoting Michael
with which I was agreeing.
So we apparently take as true that one ought not eat babies. And we suppose there is some theory T such that T? (one ought eat babies). The we are entitles to conclude ~T.
Seems pretty straight forward.
:smile: You are asking for a friend?
I was saying that I wouldn't eat babies even if I ought to. I am not (only) motivated by moral considerations. I am (more) motivated by self-interest and my "passions" (as Hume would put it).
Human psychology isn't a slave to some supposed duty.
I misunderstood you then. I agree with this.
Even if it were only for humans it doesn't then follow that it's artificial. Humans are biologically distinct from non-humans yet human biology isn't artificial; it's an objective and natural fact. It may be that humans are morally distinct from non-humans even though morality isn't artificial; it may be an objective fact (whether natural or non-natural) that only obtains for a species that reaches a sufficient level of intelligence, e.g. intelligent enough to conceive of morality.
Oh, I see. You're asking about the scope of moral statements. Interesting.
Ok, so let's suppose that moral statements are "artificial". Does it follow that they are not true? Because moral realism is the contention that there are true moral statements.
Trace Neanderthal DNA remains in modern humans, so there seems no reason not to include them in our moral discourse. Eventually one might ask how worthwhile it is to consider a behaviour immoral. While it isn't a pressing issue, there has been some recent work on the moral culpability of animals.
I entirely agree.
Again, for the third or fourth time, your purpose here is obscure. It's not clear where your reasoning leads, or where it comes from. What's your point? Are you supporting subjectivism, or just positing it for the sake of discussion?
You seem to have some very particular use of "ought" in mind, perhaps relating to deontology.
Yes, my argument hinges on that. Scientists of human origins don't agree with that, but that would take my argument into the weeds.
I can still argue this: there's an ancestral continuum from Homo Sapiens backward. Even if you want to pick a certain point where there was a mutation, this choice for where we draw the moral line is going to be arbitrary. For instance, we know that Homo Sapiens and all our close relatives have a mutation that makes our jaw muscles weak. That would be an objective separating line between us and the other animals. But why would having a weak jaw make us subject to moral rules?
Plus that demarcation will have us holding member of Homo Erectus accountable for all their bullshit.
I don't think so.
It was a discussion from several years ago that I mentioned in passing. I didn't mean to bring it into this discussion.
My neighbor has really prominent brow ridges, so maybe.
I mentioned an example. Morality applies to any species (or rather, person) with the intelligence to understand morality. I certainly don't think this arbitrary.
You have
"One ought do X" is true when everyone believes it's true.
And yet you seem to deny
"You ought to do what everyone believes you should"
As if these were not contrary.
When someone coming from an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework (A-T) encounters the characteristic categories and problematics of modern moral philosophy, they seem strange and far-removed, almost like Zeno's Paradox. It is very hard to know how to begin to bridge the gap, and in large part these two traditions have simply ignored one another. When Anscombe speaks about modern moral philosophy needing to develop a robust "psychology" or "theory of action," I think she has this gulf in mind, at least in part.
(My entry point is usually the idea that all acts are moral, or that the moral/practical and moral/psychological distinctions do not hold (which I have alluded to a few times in this thread). Interestingly, Anscombe takes an almost identical tack in her, "Medalist's Address," albeit only in passing.)
Introducing someone coming from the modern tradition to Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy would be a bit like setting someone on a motorcycle who has never driven a manual transmission or even ridden a bicycle. "'Clutch', 'front brake', 'accelerator', 'shift', 'rear brake'. Good luck, and remember to balance!" Thus, not too many have tried to bridge that gap, and many of these have done a poor job of it. Still I wanted to draw up a list of articles that would be helpful to anyone who is interested. Almost all of these essays only attempt to bite off a small chunk of the task, for obvious reasons.
As far as I know, the best philosopher who attempts to respond to questions of modern moral philosophy with an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework is Peter L. P. Simpson (website; academia.edu). He is a very strong Aristotelian and he knows the modern tradition well. For a longer treatment, see his book, Goodness and Nature and its supplement. Here are three related essays, each also available in his book, Vices, Virtues, and Consequences: Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy:
[*]"On the Naturalistic Fallacy and St. Thomas," by Peter L. P. Simpson
[/list]
The next three essays are a step removed, topically, from the first three, but they are still related. Kevin Flannery wrote the first, and he is also very good.
[*]"Justice, Scheffler and Cicero," by Peter L. P. Simpson
[*]"On Practical Thinking and St. Thomas," by Peter L. P. Simpson
[/list]
Another step removed:
[/list]
Finally, three essays by William Matthew Diem. I appreciate his work greatly, but it is more specialized and less accessible to folks coming from the modern philosophy tradition. Diem is speaking to Thomists and using Thomistic language, although I think he will still be understandable to those coming from a secular perspective:
Other relevant essays that I have not yet vetted include, "The Two Kinds of Error in Action," by G.E.M. Anscombe and Sidney Morgenbesser; "Moral Obligation," by Thomas Pink; "Normativity and Reason," by Thomas Pink; "Promising and Obligation," by Thomas Pink; "Reason and Agency," by Thomas Pink; "Law and the Normativity of Obligation", by Thomas Pink; "Natural Law and the Theory of Moral Obligation," by Thomas Pink; and "St. Thomas on Prudence and the Moral Virtues," by Alfred Freddoso.
(CC: @J, @Bob Ross, @AmadeusD, @Apustimelogist, @hypericin)
I haven't said this. I have said that one of these is true:
a) no moral sentence is truth-apt
c) no moral sentence is true
e) some moral sentence is true if everyone believes so
f) some moral sentence is true even if nobody believes so
And I've also said that I won't (always) do what I ought to do.
Not according to the Bible. Adam and Eve didn't have the knowledge of Good and Evil before they sinned.
Okay?
So why is your assessment superior to the Bible's? Why do objective moral rules only apply to persons who understand them?
Good for you.
Quoting SEP
Others differ.
You differ, yes. I don't think anybody else does.
I'm not saying that my assessment is superior to the Bible's. I'm simply providing you with a coherent account of moral realism that can explain why morality applies to humans but not cockroaches.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Michael
<This thread> :smile:
You appeared to agreed with Hyp, in his asserting those incompatible ideas. Here:
I'm just not at all sure what it is you are doing. Think I mentioned that.
Is it this idea?
Quoting Leontiskos
[Between
I was agreeing with the claim that if "one ought do X" is true when everyone believes it's true, and if everyone believe that one ought do X, then one ought do X.
Ok. You have coherence, I'll grant that. Would you agree that a persuasive argument for moral realism is going to have to account for why morality attaches only to certain kinds of intelligence?
Because the 'ought' requires scare quotes: <'One "ought" do X' is true when everyone believes it's true.>
It is a kind of definition or stipulation: <"One ought do X" iff everyone believes it's true.>
Well yes, any persuasive argument for some metaethics (whether realism, error theory, or subjectivism) is going to have to account for why morality works the way they say it does.
Would you agree that you don't know of any persuasive argument for moral realism?
I don't know of any persuasive argument for any metaethics. They all seem to have insurmountable problems.
Well, there you have it.
A lack of persuasive arguments.
Yes, that's a central aspect of metaethics; the meaning of moral sentences. What does "ought" even mean?
I think the problem is that you have a realist conception of the meaning of "ought" that you (rightly) find incompatible with an anti-realist conception, but your seeming suggestion that anti-realist obligations aren't "real" obligations is begging the question.
By the very substance of anti-realist metaethics, obligations aren't objective/absolute/intrinsic/inherent/unconditional/categorical or however you want to phrase it. Such realist obligations either fail to ever obtain or are incoherent. The only possible meaningful obligations are those that are conditional on some relevant rule-giver. Asking why one ought obey this rule-giver is a meaningless question given the actual meaning of "ought".
Here's were we came in. Two arguments for moral realism:
(1) There are statements that at the least are prima facie both moral and true.
(2) We use moral statements in reasoning, which we could not do unless they are truth-apt.
What the various versions of moral realism have in common, in opposition to other views, is that there are true moral statements.
"although some accounts of moral realism see it as involving additional commitments, say to the independence of the moral facts from human thought and practice, or to those facts being objective in some specified way"
When most of use the term "moral realism" we are talking about those accounts of morality that involve these additional commitments. Many of us have already accepted that moral sentences are truth-apt and that some are true.
I'll make this easy for you. Whenever one of us says something like "moral realism hasn't been justified", feel free to read it as saying "the moral theory that there are objective moral facts independent from human thought and practice hasn't been justified."
Arguing that people are using the wrong label when discussing the matter is a pointless argument.
Needs must. It's a response to my interlocutors.
I'll make this easy for you. From the form of the words, one would expect that realism were the negation of antirealism. It isn't. Dealing with this nuance is presumably why it was necessary to have two articles in the SEP. Antirealist attacks on realism target the subsidiary issues.
In the OP @Bob Ross argued that there were no moral truths. Setting aside the "isms", my aim has been to show that there are moral truths.
Yes, but the first thread I drafted when I arrived was on this very topic. The post was more or less finished, but I realized I wouldn't have time to actually field a thread on the topic so I postponed, and the same holds now. So that post can just be a placeholder and/or a point of reference for those who desire a way to circumvent Anscombe's argument in Modern Moral Philosophy.
I have thought of trying to pare it down to make it a smaller and more manageable thread, but these topics attract so many replies and knee-jerk reactions that I would almost prefer a back-alley discussion - haha. In any case, maybe over Christmas break I will try to set out a simple sub-thesis.
I would say that, by the very substance of anti-realist metaethics, obligations aren't obligatory. If the anti-realist theory intends to be normative, then this makes it incoherent. If the anti-realist theory intends to be merely descriptive, then it is denying the existence of true obligations and substituting some faux placeholder. Folks in this thread flip back and forth between those two options, wanting to have their cake and eat it, too; to have obligations while simultaneously holding that nothing is truly obligatory.
Quoting Michael
Remember when you yourself made the same point I am making? See:
Quoting Michael
-
Quoting Michael
I don't think so, but you are free to develop this.
I agree with @Banno that glancing blows on moral realism are occurring. I gave my account earlier:
Quoting Leontiskos
Else, getting away from Ross' language, I would say moral anti-realism is the idea that,
I think this may help avoid these strange ideas where "ought" is entirely redefined, or what is said to be "obligatory" is very clearly non-obligatory. Meta-ethics is, in part, about what 'ought' means, but it is very obvious that it does not mean, "Society says not to" (). You yourself have agreed with this: .
Right. I don't really expect anyone to engage those ideas here. I mostly wanted to have something to point to when people ask me about the crux at the heart of Anscombe's paper, and this seemed as good a place as any other.
I apologise :P
At least i now have some understanding, and grasp what i'm denying :sweat:
No worries. :smile: The difficulty is that SEP is trying to take all sorts of significantly different views and fit them into neat categories. To some extent this works, and to some extent it doesn't. We've become hung up on the edge cases, and I would say needlessly. Michael is interested in the taxonomy, but in general I would prefer just focusing on the views that participants actually hold.
That thread looks interesting, but instead of resurrecting it I am just going to make a one-off comment or two here. I was looking through a few things and I found a book by Duncan Richter, Anscombe's Moral Philosophy. In chapter three he comments on this debate, and I will just point out one or two things that popped out at me.
He notes that several philosophers have drawn attention to Anscombe's antecedents who have made very similar claims, two being Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein:
Richter argues that there are important instances of early non-religious philosophers who maintain strong obligations, including Aristotle and Cicero. Richter is arguing in large part from scholarly authorities, but I think he is surely correct. For example:
I think this is a rather important point. Richter's book is sympathetic to Anscombe, so after admitting that the argument has force, he says:
He of course goes on to explain her "main point."
Anscombe is a careful thinker and writer, and I think she could be defended in various ways, but the point for our purposes is that, although her dilemma is pressing, her historical thesis is flawed. The second paper by Peter Simpson that I referenced is meant to identify the historical lineage of just this sort of dilemma, which is acute for the modern tradition ().
(This is also very much related to 's older thread, particularly the quote above from Schopenhauer.)
Interesting. Working through this post and it's references (only insofar as they are directly relevant and retrievable) I got the feeling that I agree with Schopenhauer on the nature of obligations, but didn't think it required any kind of relegation to theology to support.
Having not read Anscombe, but knowing she was a Catholic, that seems more like protecting the roost than it does actual historicity (which i guess Richter points on half of). But, the idea that obligations arise from artificial moral systems predicated on results seems pretty clear to me.
So the formalization that has pointed out is in an archived SEP article:
Quoting SEP | Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe
But the central premise of the argument is something like this:
Quoting Michael
-
Quoting AmadeusD
Not actually, given that Anscombe's thesis is contrary to mainstream Catholic tradition, and she inevitably knew this. Ironically, Anscombe is going against Catholicism in this case. But it does look that way to the uninitiated. I think this provided two important motivations for Anscombe to write a very tight article and argument, for she would have to defend herself on two fronts.
Also, very interesting. I have a good number of Catholics friends who are practicing, and as best i can tell, they practice virtue ethics. I should probably say, if their calculations conflict with a piece of scripture they can bring to mind at the time, then that raises obstacles; but, in general, they seem to have learned from their church-going that you can't stringently rule what is right and wrong and so improving one's character, holistically (though, this is billed as 'enhancing/improving/deepening a relationship with God' so there are implications of serious limits there)is how one reaches more, and more moral viz. virtuous, positions (intellectual/emotional positions). This may be why it felt her position was 'protecting the roost'.
But, in hindsight, that seems more superficially humanist or unitarian.
Granted, that doesn't say much about Catholic tradition, but I found that an interesting little incongruence.
Well, you're affirming the consequent of (1). That one practices virtue ethics does not mean that one denies religiously based ethics.
Quoting AmadeusD
I'm Catholic. How do you think we could send atheists to Hell if they don't know right from wrong? :joke:
lol.
I was under the impression went sent ourselves to Hell...
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes. The claim is that these sort of objections you and Banno give only apply to moral theories, not theories about morality.
It might be helpful if you substantiate your notion of "obligation". I'm not aware of any normative account where moral imperatives are literally obligatory. If so there would be no moral questions, people would simply act as morality dictates.
Even if morality were a subjective matter, just personal preference, your own conscience carries a normative weight, and violating it comes at a cost.
Also, I'll note that anti-realist theories seldom if ever intend to be normative.
Your participation is profoundly optional.
Well I think that implies a very deflated notion of truth which basically aligns with what I just said there.
Then perhaps you could explain what obligations "truly" are.
The complication is that:
a) (as I said earlier) when someone claims that one ought not X we understand them as attempting to express an objective fact,
b) (as suggested by Anscombe, Wittgenstein, and Schopenhauer) the very concept of [s]obligations sans a rule-giver or punishment and reward[/s] categorical imperatives is vacuous, and
c) (as @Banno has suggested many times, and which I think is consistent with ordinary language philosophy) it's something of a truism that we have certain obligations (such as to not kick puppies)
(a) and (b) together would suggest error theory, (a) and (c) together would suggest robust realism, (b) and (c) together would suggest non-objectivism, and all appear to be true.
Perhaps the answer is that moral language is complex and cannot be adequately explained by a single metaethics.
That may not be true.
Seems like the demonstrably provable negative affects/effects stemming from not honoring one's voluntarily obligations(promises) should work just fine in lieu of a rule-giver and/or reward/punishment. Look no further than the sheer numbers of Americans who rightly do not trust politicians as proof of the vital importance of all that. Knowledge of inevitable consequences seems to me to do a better job than God or reward/punishment when it comes to knowledge of how keeping one's word is imperative to a successful society of self-governing interdependent people. I think that that is true regardless of what anyone thinks about it.
Sure.
What I was getting at is that the unconditional phrase "one ought not X" being true is vacuous. It is only meaningfully true if implying something like "according to Y, one ought not X" or "one ought not X or Y will happen".
Much like the phrase "X is beautiful" being true must be understood as implying "according to Y, X is beautiful". Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
So, (1) and (3) but not (2) as written???
Because there is no need for a rule giver(God) or reward/punishment but rather just good ole knowledge of causality. Hence, it is not the case that obligation is vacuous sans a rule giver and/or reward/punishment.
My use of the phrase "reward and punishment" was meant as an inclusive phrase to account for any desirable or undesirable consequence.
Unnecessarily multiplying entities. Reward and punishment requires a judge. Causality does not.
You're being unnecessarily pedantic. I've clarified my meaning.
Drawing and maintaining a distinction between reward/punishment and causality is not unnecessary regarding (2).
Your rendering makes (2) true. Mine does not.
So, (1) and (3) but not (2) on my rendering and all three on yours.
Here, we look at the consequences of drawing the distinction or not, and we can all see that it is not an unnecessarily pedantic endeavor.
"One ought not kick puppies."
How do your claims quoted above cover that one? Seems perfectly meaningful and true from where I sit despite not needing to be bolstered by what you suggest all such claims require.
That's the exact problem. "One ought not kick puppies" seems meaningfully true and yet the concept of categorical imperatives seems vacuous. I don't know how to resolve this contradiction.
I have something like a visceral acceptance of such categorical imperatives but I cannot rationally accept the almost magical, wishful thinking of them.
Ah I see. So that serves as a clear cut counterexample to the notion that all claims in the form of "One ought not X" imply conditionals.
If the categorical imperative "one ought not kick puppies" is true then it would be a counterexample to the claim that all imperatives are hypothetical, but it hasn't been proven that the categorical imperative "one ought not kick puppies" is true.
That's the very thing being discussed.
1. A categorical imperative is just "one ought not X".
2. A hypothetical imperative is "according to Y, one ought not X" or "one ought not X or Z will happen."
I cannot rationally justify the truth of any (1), and yet many seem to be true. It's something of a cognitive dissonance.
Need it be 'proven' in order for you to know it?
Well, it needs to be reasonably justified at least.
Does it? I mean justificatory regress has to stop somewhere, right? Why not right there?
I did make much the same point elsewhere. You just either accept moral realism or you don't. I remain skeptical.
There's your resolution regarding the dissonance.
As an aside, Proust caused a severe case of cognitive dissonance within me after following his logic as he set out Gettier during a lengthy conversation he and I had over a decade ago. That was my first full fledged experience regarding deep considerations of the Gettier problem. That resolution wasn't nearly as neat or as tidy as this one.
:wink:
It doesn't resolve it because I don't know which side to take. Do I accept that, as a categorical imperative, I ought not kick puppies, or do I accept that categorical imperatives make no sense? You might be able to pick a side without justification but I can't.
Hence why I remain a skeptic.
Looking at @Michael's options:
a) no moral sentence is truth-apt
c) no moral sentence is true
e) some moral sentence is true if everyone believes so
f) some moral sentence is true even if nobody believes so
f stands out as requiring a separate kind of thing in the universe: moral facts. That puts supporters of f at a unique disadvantage. If we are going to introduce a new ontological category, then there should be something only that new kind of thing can explain, or direct evidence of its existence, for the addition to not be gratuitous. But hard realists can furnish neither. Therefore f should be discarded.
This parallels the deism debate. It is famously hard to prove the non-existence of an (also ontologically novel) being. But it is up to the deists to provide direct evidence, or something that cannot be explained without a deity.
One ought keep one's promises.
And this because a promise just it the sort of thing one ought to keep.
And again, I don't see that "one ought not kick puppies for fun" needs any further justification. I would not like to be around folk who do that shit.
What relevance is that? Is liking or not liking to be around folk the measure of obligation?
Quoting Banno
Well that's just begging the question.
Not at all. But this is where Wittgenstein was heading - that at some stage the justifications have to end, and we say: "This is what we do!"
You are bothered by "categorical imperatives", by authority, both looking for some way to ground your imperatives, to provide certainty. I don't see a need for that. You both agree that we ought not kick puppies, but want something more... as if, upon coming across a puppy-kicker, you would be able to convince them of the error of their ways by your brilliant philosophical argumentation. No, you get the bugger arrested.
Ethics is about what we do, and so it does not rest on argument but on action.
Exactly!
I think that "queerness" is not easy to establish -- or, at least, is as hard to establish as "not-queer". I don't know how we get to a place where we know, or are even able to judge, what queerness is.
The Argument from Queerness suggests that moral stuff presents us with “qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe”. Why can't a realist simply agree with this and say that these qualities and relations are indeed different, precisely because these are the characteristics of moral qualities...
Perhaps the supposed "queerness" is a consequence of their direction of fit being world to word.
But why must it end there? This seems like fleeing from battle while declaring your victory. Admitting that your belief is just an arbitrary dogma gets you points for honesty but not much else.
Rather than "queer", how about "non-physical" and "non-mathematical"?
We can learn of and test physical and mathematical claims; empirically in the case of the physical and rationally by applying rules of inferences to some set of axioms in the case of mathematics (and other formal logical systems).
What about for moral claims? As that article continues to say, "in order to track such weird properties we would need 'some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else'."
What evidence or reasoning is there for such a thing? As @hypericin says, it introduces a new ontological category, apparently a propos of nothing. If you cannot justify the existence of such things, why posit them in the first place?
I suspect many just have something like a base need to "validate" their disgust of certain behaviours.
Some here seem overly fond of appeals to the stone.
Aren’t actions themselves forms of questions we put to our world, experiments anticipating a response which may either validate or invalidate the action? Isnt even the firmest statement of ethical principle, and the most confident action in service of it, a kind of pragmatic question? Both thought and action seek justification, the first via further thought, the second through a material response from the world.
Not only that, it reveals an implict doubt and self-questioning that directly correlates with the intensity of dogmatic certainty.
Quoting goremand
Because at some stage one must act.
Quoting Banno
@Leontiskos might find the puppy-kicker culpable for going against the will of god, @Michael can't make a case that kicking puppies is culpable, but we might agree that the act is blameworthy.
Quoting Michael
One demonstrates the reality of the world by interacting with it, hence the reality of ethical statements by enacting them.
is partly right, but perhaps has too sharp a distinction between thought and act. and act. Next he can't decide if doubt is worthy, or a sign of weakness.
You don't kick a puppy. I kick a puppy. We've both interacted with the world.
Your comments don't really say anything relevant at all.
I think you need to read Simpson's, "Autonomous Morality and the Idea of the Noble." There are some people in this thread who are laboring under the intuitions of modern moral philosophy without understanding the origins. There are others who are also working from that framework while also understanding the origins, and who possess a bit of skepticism about the approach. My post about Simpson, Diem, et al. was directed to the latter group. The knot needs to be loosened before it can be untied.
Others do. It's who they are.
You choose for yourself what to believe. You choose whether to laugh with them or to stop them.
What does any of this have to do with morality and moral obligation?
I started to sketch out a thread relating to your dilemma, but I am finding that I am simply covering ground Simpson has already covered better. Still, here is something I say in that sketch:
So let's take an example that more or less grants the modern paradigm (and for that reason I am tempted to strike it from my draft):
In your other thread you ask if something like A1 is a moral claim or a pragmatic claim (). Let's just leave your notions of "naturalism" and "non-naturalism" to the side for a moment. Why can't it be both? And more fundamentally, do you believe it to be true or do you believe it to be false?
That suffering ought to be avoided should not be a contentious claim. "Suffering ought to be sought" is a sort of synthetic contradiction (). We might choose suffering for some ulterior reason, but we never do (and never should) choose suffering as an end in itself.
What I want to say is, "Let this truth reorganize your flawed system. Your system says that there are no normative truths, but this argument disproves that thesis, and therefore the system is flawed" (). Of course this is very hard for people to do, for it requires overthrowing the entire modern way of doing moral philosophy (and philosophy of mind). Wayfarer was clearly not able to do it in that thread. That's why I offered stepping stones in my earlier post ().
In all the theorising in this thread we may lose track of the purpose of ethical thinking: to decide what to do. Ethics has to be about the relation between belief and action.
I accept that I have a pragmatic reason to not cause myself suffering. But what do you mean by saying that we also have a moral reason to not cause myself suffering? What does the term "moral" add? And what evidence or reasoning suggests that, in addition to being pragmatic, avoiding suffering is also moral?
Lots of things we do have nothing to do with ethics. Lots of things we do are amoral. I don't sleep with men, play baseball, or cut my wrists.
So when do we get to the part where you actually explain morality?
I have been. A shame you seem to have a sort of blindness to it. It looks as if you have decided that you cannot act unless you are certain of what to do, and yet you must act and without certainty. So you are stuck.
I don't think you know what you mean by 'moral' any more than Kant did.
Here's the question: Do you agree with me that, ceteris paribus, one ought not cause suffering for themselves? Remember, I am concerned with binding normative propositions (). I don't know what you mean by 'moral', and I don't think you do either.
I don't need to posit something like "moral obligations" to decide how to act. Wants and pragmatic concerns are more than sufficient.
As a pragmatic matter, yes. But I'm asking about morality.
If that were so, your presence in this forum seems inexplicable.
Quoting Michael
You don't see the incongruity here?
Quoting Leontiskos
You replied:
Quoting Michael
What do you mean by it? Apparently you mean
Why?
Quoting Banno
No. Unless you want to argue for some form of naturalism where "moral" just means "pragmatic"? In which case see Moore's open question argument.
But you're the one who objected that something cannot be pragmatic and moral in the first place, so obviously the burden is on you. You are the one claiming that there is some distinction. I don't even know what it means to say that something cannot be pragmatic and moral. I don't know what definition of 'moral' could account for such a strange approach.
Quoting Leontiskos
I'm not saying that they can't be. I'm only saying that "pragmatic" and "moral" don't mean the same thing (see Moore's open question argument). When I asked you if it was pragmatic or moral, interpret it as an inclusive or.
You seem to be in a position parallel to @Corvus, who denies certainty of the "external world" while interacting with it through the forums.
Because you won't address what I'm saying.
Not every action is ethical. Not every choice requires ethical deliberation. My decision to play, or not play, baseball has nothing to do with ethics at all.
So you need something other than vague references to "actions" and "choices" if you want to make any sense of, and justify, all this seemingly unnecessary talk about morality. We don't need it. We can get by perfectly well just considering what we want and what's pragmatic.
I am repeating myself, but I think the moral and the normative are the same. I don't think there are non-moral 'oughts'. I also don't think 'ought' claims that admit of exceptions are non-moral (hence my "ceteris paribus"). I think consequentialism is a moral theory. I think the Kantian understanding of morality expressed by your thread is vacuous, and I think our culture labors under it needlessly.
Quoting Leontiskos
(I'm probably going to leave it there for now. I'm a bit tired of this fast-food approach to philosophy.)
I think you may agree with me that Kant's epistemology was as impossible as his moral theory, and I would say, with Simpson, that this is no coincidence. Granted, the epistemological problems preceded Kant, but he managed to fit morality into that square circle.
Seems inconsistent with ordinary language.
I ought to brush my teeth. I ought to buy my groceries whilst the sale is on. I ought not go out in the rain without an umbrella. I ought not move my pawn backwards.
This is a perfectly acceptable use of language. Why introduce a new ontological category of "moral" facts? What purpose do they serve?
Ask Kant.
Of course it is. In choosing to play a game you are choosing not to volunteer to fight in Ukraine. Ethics pervades everything you do.
Quoting Leontiskos
yep.
What does choosing not to volunteer to fight in Ukraine have to do with ethics?
And it must be exhausting for you to have to consider "should I go fight in Ukraine instead?" every time you choose to do something.
I should say that I am perfectly open to the definition of morality as justice (i.e. pertaining to interactions with others). Normative justice claims, if you like. I think either definition is fine, but the justice definition is closer to ordinary usage.
That leaves me somewhat nonplused. We've found why we are talking past each other?
The idea here is probably that the act involves a moral omission.
And that needs to be explained, not simply asserted. I don't know what this word "moral" means. Does it refer to some natural property in the world? If so, what? If not then I need someone to actually make sense of it and justify its existence. It seems superfluous. What mystery about the world does it answer?
Meanwhile, I'm going to watch some TV and not worry about whether or not watching TV is "moral". I do it simply because it interests me, and that's enough.
I think you're just being contentious at this point. You consistently refuse the burden of proof, refuse to give substantive answers, and nitpick everything that is said.
You say A1 is not 'moral' by the mysterious definition you have consistently refused to provide. What about A3? Is that 'moral'?
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't know what "moral" means so I can't answer. It's pragmatic, sure. So what else is there? You're the one positing the existence of some other quality. The burden is on you to explain it and justify it.
That's odd, given that you have consistently objected that my claims are non-moral. How do you object on the basis of a concept you do not know?
Quoting Michael
You spoke of ordinary language. Is, "Do not needlessly cause others to suffer," moral according to your understanding of ordinary language?
I don't think I've said this. I've only said that "one ought not X" can be understood in pragmatic terms, and that if Moore's open question argument is correct then "moral" doesn't mean "pragmatic".
It might also be understood in moral terms, but that's on you to explain, not me.
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, I don't know what "moral" means. I only interpret that statement as a command. Someone is telling me what to do. "Don't cause others to suffer", "don't forget to brush your teeth", "don't go outside today because it's raining", etc.
Ayer would be proud.
Well, if we define morality according to justice, as the realm of interpersonal 'oughts', then A3 is a moral truth.
I would say that in the realm of speculative reason there is the law of non-contradiction, which no one directly denies, but which they do indirectly deny. Are we obliged to obey the law of non-contradiction? Yes, I think so. Are we necessitated to obey it? Yes and no. People contradict themselves, but not directly and on purpose. See my conversation with .
The same holds in the realm of practical reason. Things which we know (or believe) to be good are things that we know we ought to do. Things which we know (or believe) to be bad or evil are things that we know we oughtn't do. Are we obliged to obey this first principle of practical reason? Yes, I think so. Are we necessitated to obey it? Yes and no. People do what they believe to be evil, but not directly and on purpose. They justify evil acts by re-specifying them according to some other perspective, and in relation to a highly desirable end.*
So although we know A3, there are nevertheless times when we cause suffering in unjust ways, and when we do this we are "looking away" from, or failing to apply our obligation, just as when someone contradicts themselves they are "looking away" from, or failing to apply the law of non-contradiction. We know that obeying things like the law of non-contradiction and A3 is required of us, but we are nevertheless capable of distracting ourselves from this obligation and carrying out bad acts, in both the speculative and practical realms.
* For example, "[Kant's] own rigoristic convictions on the subject of lying were so intense that it never occurred to him that a lie could be relevantly described as anything but just a lie (e.g. as "a lie in such-and-such circumstances"). His rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it" (Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy," p. 2).
You could think of obligations in terms of punishment and reward if you like. "If you do that you will suffer," or, "If you do that you will regret it." I don't think this captures the full sense, but it is something.
Quoting Michael
Quoting Michael
Note that in that thread you give a disjunctive syllogism. You say something like, "Obligation could be x, y, or z, but since it is none of those things we are in a pickle" (you speak about "a moral claim's truth conditions").
To me, this is like saying, "The car could be red, green, or blue, but since it is none of those things it has no color." But what if there are other colors? What if obligation is not reducible to descriptive facts, or modal logic (necessitation), or mechanistic science? What if teleology and orderedness exists?
If we accept the is-ought distinction one might be tempted to think that the only possible ground of morality is brute 'oughts'. But what if there are other realities which are neither is/ought, but which ground 'oughts'? I am thinking of something like the nature of suffering. Once we experience suffering and come to understand what it is, then A1 follows, and A1 is an 'ought'. Thus there is a tertium quid between valueless 'is' truths and 'ought' truths.
The response here is apparently, "Well A1 doesn't fit into my categories, therefore I reject it." Of course it doesn't fit into your categories! That's the whole point. Your categories are too narrow, and there are obvious truths which burst those categories.
Do you think it is a moral failure for people to have inconsistent beliefs?
"Things which we know (or believe) to be bad or evil are things that we know we oughtn't do." We know it is bad or evil to simultaneously hold contradictory propositions, and therefore we know we ought not do so. Whether one wants to call this a moral failure will depend on their definition of moral. I have given two definitions, one which would apply and one which would not.
What do you think?
You shouldn't just rewrite the OP and the title of a thread after 30+ pages of discussion. I'd say this shouldn't even be allowed, but I realize the forum can't currently enforce edit-timers. I'd suggest changing it back instead of giving the mods a headache with strange cases like this. If you want to rewrite your OP from scratch then make a new thread.
(This is a great real-time example of an 'ought', by the way)
I think that is a fine description of moral obligation. To refresh, my question was a response to:
Quoting Leontiskos
In the sense of obligation you described, how does moral subjectivism fail to provide "true obligations", where moral subjectivism is defined as "moral values and judgements are personal, but are deeply informed by both enculturation (moral training) and moral instincts (empathy and a sense of justice/fairness)."
:up:
Quoting hypericin
Well, here's the dilemma again:
Quoting Leontiskos
You said:
Quoting hypericin
You say that a subjective conscience morality is normative, but that anti-realist theories (including subjectivism) seldom if ever intend to be normative. Is your subjective conscience theory intended to be normative?
The first thing I would want to know about any theory is whether it intends to be normative.
(I don't think @Banno or myself have been equivocating between theories about morality and moral theories; I think it is the subjectivists who are doing this. Therefore I would like them to be candid about whether their theory is intended to be normative.)
No. I would say not that one should listen to their conscience, but that one does.
Is it possible to ignore and act contrary to your conscience?
But do you see how you are toeing the line between normativity and non-normativity, which I have complained about several times throughout this thread?
Should we act according to our moral sensibility or not? Should we listen to our conscience or not? Should we follow the majority or not? Is this a normative theory or not? At some point clarity and precision need to be brought to the position you are advocating so that we know what you are saying and what you are not saying. If that doesn't happen then I will try to follow you in one direction or another, and then four posts down the road you will complain that I am misrepresenting your position, saying that it is not normative at all. "The first thing I would want to know about any theory is whether it intends to be normative."
No, I can't say that I can see how I'm toeing the line. AFAICT everything I have been saying has been descriptive, not normative.
Quoting Leontiskos
These are your questions, not mine. I think we probably should, but that is not the focus here.
But what is the focus, if not 'shoulds', 'oughts', and the "I thinks" of subjectivism?
Are there moral facts, and if so are they objective? I believe there are, and that they are subjective. You believe they are objective. The goal is a description of what these purported "moral facts" are, and how they operate. "Moral facts" involve "should", "ought", so in that sense they are the focus. But the idea is to describe, not prescribe.
But if a theory is using 'ought' in a non-normative way, then it is "denying the existence of true obligations and substituting some faux placeholder" (). 'Ought' is a normative term. Do you really say that 'ought' is a non-normative term?
Further, starting with conscience and calling it a non-normative reality is a fraught way to begin such an account, given that conscience is universally accepted to be the very thing that we should listen to. "People do listen to their conscience, but I am not saying that you should listen to it." It feels like bait in a trap.
Please note that when I spoke about the law of non-contradiction and the first principle of practical reason, I was clear that they are normative/obligatory (). Conscience is an exact parallel, perhaps influenced by my examples, and yet you pivot in the opposite direction and call it non-normative/non-obligatory. In law and morality conscience is thought to be so binding that it is said that an erring conscience binds, i.e. one must listen to their conscience even if their conscience is wrong. This is why "conscience rights" prescind from whether the conscience is right or wrong. Such laws recognize that asking someone to disobey their conscience would be a grave assault on them.
Quoting hypericin
If you think we should listen to our conscience, then your theory of conscience is normative, and it is a "moral theory" (). You add "probably," but this is the tentativeness that I addressed earlier on:
Quoting Leontiskos
I think conscience is just self talk. People’s conscience also tells them they should have killed that rapist when they had the chance. They should have kept the money they found, etc. We call self-talk conscience when the talk seems to match conventional behavioural expectations as we might find them in church or a popular sitcom. Many people regret not stealing or lying or beating the shit out of someone, although they might find comfort behind a pretence of having done the ‘right thing.’
What about those of us who are not here necessarily to figure out how to act on a personal level, but wish to discuss the theoretical underpinnings of moral systems purely out of intellectual curiosity? All you're giving them is a gigantic dodge.
So to say that something is moral is to say that it is just? That just shifts the question to a new mystery. What is the ontological status of justice? Is it a natural or non-natural property? Is it a fact we discover, like physics, or is it a fact we construct through social convention? How do we verify or falsify a claim that something is just?
I think evil is in the eye of the beholder, in that evil is something our evolved monkey minds tend to project on things in the world. The notion of a HUD, where things which aren't actually part of the world get projected on top of more straightforward perceptions, might help illustrate this notion.
As we social primates do, in the heat of the moment I'm prone to see people as evil and act on the basis of such mental projections. However in this era, where dishing out the law of the jungle is seldom well advised, I think it is generally better to recognize one's mental projection of evil, for the monkey mindedness that it is, and try to achieve a more enlightened perspective. If I am able to step back from seeing red and recognize my projection of evil for what it is, I tend to be able to act in a more productive way.
Contrary to your claim that, "We know it is bad or evil to simultaneously hold contradictory propositions, and therefore we know we ought not do so.", I understand that it is simply an aspect of human learning that we will often find ourselves holding contradictory propositions. It doesn't make much sense to see oneself as evil for exemplifying such a human characteristic. Of course it is valuable to resolve self contradictory beliefs to the extent one is able, but that hardly makes a person with unresolved self contradictions evil.
? Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series
Quoting Tom Storm
I’m with you here. I find both moral realism and moral subjectivism to be fairly nauseating, but my own touchstones on the subject of morality are so far removed from these ways of thinking that bringing them in would just derail the thread. Of course, that won’t stop me from sneaking in a quote from Ken Gergen:
Quoting wonderer1
You god-denying heretic
You left off, "and vile thread derailer". :wink:
I already told you: "interpersonal 'oughts'." :roll:
A3 is a true interpersonal 'ought'.
Ah, the warm glow of Christian love.
Anyway, I gave a serious response to your question. What do you think?
I don't think you managed to address the central question. Do you believe that we ought not hold contradictory positions, or do you disagree?
Your argument was that contradictions inevitably occur, and therefore they are not bad. Wounds also inevitably occur. Are they bad? Should they be avoided? Should we apply bandage and salve, or leave them to fester?
I am not surprised that you would pat yourself on the back like this, with no account in sight. It occurs constantly. I find your own thoughts on most subjects to be vacuous, and yes, thread-derailing. For example, your post <here> was one of the most unintelligent things I have read on this forum. I think I'll start my New Year's resolution early by ignoring the vacuous back-patter. :wink:
Like “you ought to listen to my music, it’s really good”?
Sure, suggestion, advice, command, remonstrance, etc. These are all interpersonal 'oughts'. I gave my fuller account here: .
Doesn’t seem like a moral obligation though so I think you need to revise your definition.
I don't think there is any moral fact of the matter, though there is certainly pragmatic value in continually wiping the mirror.
I don't think you have considered what I proposed seriously enough. (Although understandably it's likely to take some time for you to develop some relevant recognitions.) I recommend looking into Zen for some useful tools for breaking down weakly trained intuitions.
One thing I think might be worth considering, is the way that you yourself have just demonstrated the monkey mindedness I was referring to. Another is your propensity for jumping to conclusions.
Fair warning, I spent the prior 15 years as a regular atheist poster on William Lane Craig's (now shuttered) forum. Here's a thread you might find surprisingly educational:
Does being in a blaming state of mind amount to Monkey Mindedness?
I was debating on creating a new thread, but didn't see the need since this thread essentially morphed into a debate about moral realist accounts vs. moral subjectivism. But, I went ahead and reverted it and created a thread for archive purposes of this thread.
Well we've already been through this. I give a definition of 'moral' and demonstrate a moral claim; you say it isn't moral; I ask what you mean by 'moral'; and then you say you have no idea (e.g. ). I'm going to step off the merry-go-round and simply point back to my post <here>, which was intended for any who have a serious interest in this topic.
Edit: The other problem here is that you have consistently ignored the central question of whether A3 is moral. The evasiveness that you have been displaying becomes particularly rarefied when it comes to this question, which was a central question in the first place. Whenever possible, you say, "That claim is not moral." Yet you can't do this with A3, and so the evasion becomes more pronounced in that case ().
Added in an edit to the earlier post:
Quoting Leontiskos
How can you make such a claim if you do not know what "moral" is?