Janus

They all depend on perspective and what is thought to be desirable. Good for what, in other words? So, it is not good to turn away asylum seekers if y...

Well, the rest of your reply consisted only in examples, the relevance to the question of which I have been unable to discern. And you don't need to w...

Wow, man, and you claim you never indulge in posturing! :rofl:

Gee, are you suggesting that my use of "begs the question" is not correct? I realize that "begs the question" usually refers to cases where the truth ...

So, you're now saying they were off the mark?

Your point, if there is one, is obscure.

Not in all cases, I would say.

Yet you have been analogizing between moral propositions and empirical propositions, and seem to have been claiming that both are truth-apt in the sam...

I think you meant to write "Yes" here, so I will assume that you did. If something that accords with the most common, cross-cultural feelings of commu...

Then you acknowledge that goodness is human-dependent, dependent on human moral sensibility, human dependent in ways that empirical phenomena are not?...

The 'absolutely' is there to indicate that I think you seem to be claiming that goodness is some human-independent, quasi-empirical quality analogous ...

I think you've drilled down to it! We expect everyone who would participate in our communal life to value that life and concomitantly, life in general...

And yet you still believe that you could be warranted in claiming that something is wrong, simpliciter; or in other words you still believe that it co...

That's fine, but at least acknowledge that there is a difference between claiming something is wrong, simpliciter, and saying that you think something...

They may feel and think it is right. It's not a matter of being right or wrong; it's a matter of whether it is more or less universally felt and thoug...

To say something is just wrong just is to assert that it is wrong regardless of anyone's opinion; and this is what is usually meant by saying that som...

My feelings when I see the broken puppy are clear evidence that I should not injure puppies, and that I prefer that no one else does either; but my fe...

We probably all agree that turd milkshakes are wrong, but that doesn't make them objectively wrong. does it?

They can claim (or better, assert) that their moral view is true for them, which is to say that the moral view is true to their own moral feelings.

I don't know why. I'm certainly not.

Of course they cannot make moral claims (if by that you mean universalizing claims) but they can certainly make statements about their own moral prefe...

So, this should be "So, you look at the broken pup and crying child and don't feel any compassion?" Of course if you feel compassion then your moral f...

This is simplistic and misleading. A moral subjectivist will not, cannot (consistently), "say what the speaker prefers for everyone" if that is taken ...

Is it possible to have a subjective morality then? What if I said that I consider actions to be morally right (for me, not for others, mind) that lead...

Sure they could claim they were doing the right thing...the right thing to serve their ends. Or on the other hand, there is no "the right thing" there...

It depends on what you mean by "power for oneself" and "one flourishing".. Power to do what? Be benevolent and compassionate towards, or suppress, exp...

It is not inconceivable that a certain type of person who loves living dangerously as an outlaw could want to live in a society where no one trusted a...

Moral judgements are mental by definition insofar as they are conceptual and linguistically expressed. Does it follow that such judgements cannot be m...

So you are claiming that moral thought and action cannot be driven by anything in humans apart from the merely mental, or in other words cannot be mot...

I think what you have shown here is that, in extremis, it is possible for humans to value or dis-value almost anything. I do generally agree with what...

Are you saying that all human properties are merely subjective?

The framing of standards is a human property...what else?

The problem I see here is: imagine that something no longer exists, and was never valued while it existed, so no one knows that it ever existed. In th...

"Never say "Never"".

But could something be valuable if it was never valued in the past, is not valued now, and will never come to be valued in the future?

Not thinking about one's (seemingly) inevitable mortality in relation to how one's life is lived is a very different thing than thinking one will live...

I think the challenge was already there as soon as humans became reflectively self-aware; how to cope with the knowledge of one's own inevitable death...

That question seems to raise others: What is meant by "valuable" in the context of the question? If to be valuable does not entail actually being valu...

And posturing...?

How many religious followers have "understanding"? See Kierkegaard's criticism of the Christians of his day. I haven't said that religious faith canno...

I'm not sure humanism would necessarily be associated with "lack of any objective moral truth". I wasn't thinking so much of the question of moral pri...

According to Kate Raworth in her book Doughnut Economics, the greatest part of the expense and risk of research and development, yielding the technica...

:cool:

OK, but I wasn't suggesting with that analogy that it is a metaphysical issue, rather that it is a phenomenological one. You could also say 'psycholog...

I think this gives the clue. Moral principles are based on what we value, and commonly held moral principles on what is most universally valued. In th...

I think the idea of 'das Man' represents the human tendency, when faced with existential choices, to defer to generalized models of 'what one does' in...

Are you confident that common feeling was not always against slavery? Could it not be that the common people were simply not in situations that allowe...

I think the implied premise is "in accord with the most common feelings".

Why would it? I'm simply trying to define what it means to say that something is moral or immoral, as opposed to saying that some individual thinks th...

Is not Bob's action moral or immoral on account of what would be the normal, or the most common, human attitude to it? It seems to me the most common ...