Your obsession with objective and subjective. I don't think these terms work as well as you suggest. — Banno

Not everything in the world is something functioning in a mental way. As far as we know so far, only brains do that. Brains functioning in a mental way are obviously important to us, so it's worth being able to refer to that with a succinct term. But it's important to be able to refer to the other stuff, too. And making this distinction is especially important when people get so often and so easily confused about the distinction and the implications of it, for example, via projection, where they believe that the world at large has features that are exclusively specific to their brain functioning in a mental way, in what essentially amounts to self-centeredness gone wild.

So it's like "The cat is on the mat". I show Fred the cat on the mat, and he yet insists that the cat is not on the mat. I bring in a panel of experts, and do various tests to check his language use, things like washing the mat, patting the cat, and so on, and find no obvious difference. I put the cat back on the mat, and yet Fred still insists that it is not the case that the cat is on the mat. I conclude that there is something wrong with Fred. — Banno

You can't just go by other people's views. That would be an argumentum ad populum. What matters is if it's a phenomenon that occurs outside of our minds.

So it's like "The cat is on the mat". I show Fred the cat on the mat, and he yet insists that the cat is not on the mat. I bring in a panel of experts, and do various tests to check his language use, things like washing the mat, patting the cat, and so on, and find no obvious difference. I put the cat back on the mat, and yet Fred still insists that it is not the case that the cat is on the mat. I conclude that there is something wrong with Fred.
— Banno

You can't just go by other people's views. That would be an argumentum ad populum. — Terrapin Station

Actually, if these experts are legitimate, then it would be a valid appeal to authority, and he also talks about conducting various empirical tests.

However, Banno's mistake is failing to realise that our standard in moral judgement stems from us! We're not making a comparison with anything external to ourselves. Banno is unconsciously making a comparison with his own standard of judgement, but erroneously thinks that he's appealing to objective morality. Not only is the notion of objective morality unsubstantiated, it would serve no purpose which isn't already met by our own standard of judgement. Banno simply judges kicking puppies to be immoral, as do I, with or without the chimaera of objective morality. Nothing else is required. The notion of objective morality is about as useful as a bottomless bucket.

It's not about keeping a promise.

Read the eyesore.

Read the eyesore. — creativesoul

Cut down the eyesore, and I'll read it. I'm not in the mood for a word search.

You don't want an ethical system that is concerned with people and what they like or dislike, enjoy or not enjoy, desire or don't desire? You just want to base it on facts, — Terrapin Station

I think how people feel is a fact, but it does not mean they are right in what they feel. It can be a fact that I believe the earth is flat.

If someone is psychologically harmed because they are prevented from beating their girlfriend then I have more sympathy with her harm from being hit than his mental anguish because he can't harm someone else. I would advise him to seek therapy.

I don't think atrocities like the slave trade and genocide should only be bad based on personal feeling.

In my view they clearly are identical. — Terrapin Station

I think there is a difference between something being identical and something being the same thing.

An apple is considered to be made up of atoms but an atom is not identical to an apple. I am not sure what, for example, is identical about my thought that China is undemocratic and my neuronal activity.

I'm saying that the idea, the concept of nonphysical things is literally incoherent. So if we're going to posit them and take the notion seriously, we need to be able to characterize what nonphysical things would even be, in terms of any positive properties, so that we could make some sense out of them, in general ontological terms. — Terrapin Station

I do not see how math and concepts are physical or pain and color sensations. I do not need to offer an alternative explanation to not believe they are physically explicable.

However my original point was that people do not accept your physicalist premise which seems to underlie your belief that morality isn't objective. I am agnostic but billions of people are religious or esoteric and probably will not accept a morality on your basis.

I think the purely physical does not leave room for values and morality and is just about mechanics and facts.

it's a phenomenon that occurs outside of our minds. — Terrapin Station

How's that?

The best outcome is the one which best reflects reality. It's counterintuitive that all of our moral statements are false. That doesn't seem to best reflect reality. So I think that reaching the conclusion of an error theorist is a sign that we need to go back and change something or construct something new. It's like the error theorist only does half a job. He stops before the project has been completed and throws his hands up in the air, saying "This is just how it is". But it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to live in a state of disrepair, stuck under a malfunctioning model. This is a decision that's for us to make. — S

So this standards approach seems like a better alternative, since it avoids these big problems you get with the absolutist approach. — S

I'm not faced with the problem of struggling to explain why our moral statements seem to reflect truths in some way. They do reflect truths if you look at it in the right way. It seems fallacious to set the bar impossibly high for moral truth when you don't have to. — S

There is truth in our moral judgement, and that seems to be good enough to make morality work. It also sits better with people than trying to persuade them that it's all a sham and we just have to act as though it were otherwise. Throw 'em a bone! So there's no objective morality, that doesn't have to mean that there's no morality, and it doesn't have to mean that there's no truth in it. — S

Cool. So let's go into this account that you have. I'm afraid I do not understand it, or at least that my understanding is minimal.

As I get you you're saying that there is not absolute truth in ethics, but there is relative truth in ethics. As I said earlier I don't think that truth is the sort of thing which is relative to the standards we use to determine truth -- or as @Banno put it above, that belief differs from truth.

I used the case of a bolt to highlight how we normally talk about facts. We might say, using this definition of absolute, that the bolts length of 20 millimeters is an absolute truth, because its length does not vary with the standard we use -- imperial or metric units.

I fully grant that ethics and matters of fact are not exactly the same. In fact, by my account, the difference lies in that in one case there are facts, but in the other case there are no facts.

But you are saying there is some relative sense of truth which makes moral statements true. Now if you agree with me that matters of fact are not standard-relative, then there must be something else going on when we're talking about relative truth aside from the standards that we use. What is this difference that makes moral propositions relatively true, while they are absolutely false, if it is not facts? And in what sense is that truth?

Or, more generally if you feel these questions are leading -- what is your account of ethical statements such that it is not emotivist in the usual sense of that word, and not absolutist in the sense we were discussing, but relativist and yet true?

EDIT -- or, in afterthought if that is still just misunderstanding your position, could you just explain your position?

Read the eyesore.
— creativesoul

Cut down the eyesore, and I'll read it. I'm not in the mood for a word search. — S

No thanks Sapientia. You've already made up your mind.

The human moral sensibility is built upon thought/belief(rudimentary) and thinking about thought and belief(complex thought/belief replete with naming and describing practices)...

Prior to our ability to name our mental ongoings, we were having them.

That is true in a point of view invariant kind of way. Any notion of morality that consists of moral judgment alone is impoverished. Any discourse in morality that meets only that as a standard has an emaciated criterion/notion at it's heart.

Belief about acceptable/unacceptable behaviour was always and is still yet formed and held long before we begin language use in earnest(long before naming and describing practices are first being learned). During these earliest of our thought/belief formations, we are finding out, remembering, and thus establishing what sorts of behaviours we do not like. At this age, there is no difference in the mind of the person, between what we like/dislike and what's acceptable/unacceptable.

However, we...

...as people who are capable of reporting upon our own thought/belief, are also capable of knowing that liking and/or disliking an others' behaviour begins prior to language, and that morality has an emotional element.

That's where emotion can be observed in it's earliest stages.

Moral discourse best keep this in mind.

All statements are true/false solely by virtue of correspondence to what has happened. Moral statements are no different.

If you cannot figure out a sensible coherent way to incorporate this into your framework, then it's time to fix your framework.

Facts are what has happened.

When a sincere statement is made then the world ought match the meaning of the expression... and always does unless the speaker is mistaken. The same holds good for making a promise.

How's that? — Banno

You have the idealism disease, too? Or are you just pretending to for "fun"?

a valid appeal to authority, — S

No such thing in my view. The fact that any person(s) is considered an authority in x never makes it the case that what they say about x is correct, or "more likely to be correct," simply because they're considered an authority. They always have to be correct on the merit of what they're claiming, not their social status or status in the judgment of others. And then their status should ride on the fact that they've said (past tense) things that are correct, with that never serving as a guarantee (or anything like it) that what they'll say next isn't nonsense.

And the whole idea of this is the whole idea of peer reviewed journals for example. Your paper always has to pass the review process as if you were a nobody. Of course, the flaw in that system is that the experts doing the reviews can give the stamp of approval to crappy, poorly-conceived, etc. work, but there's no way around needing people to make evaluations in that situation.

A property (whether color or toxicity) need not be universal to be real.
— Andrew M

I'm not sure how you're using "universal" there, and I haven't at all been saying anything about that. I wasn't making a point about whether anything is "universal" or not. — Terrapin Station

I mean the scope of a property. A property can have a limited scope (e.g., only be applicable to human beings) and still be real.

Re the rest of the post, if you have a suggestion about how how we could have a "realist" ethics, I'll take a critical look at it and comment. — Terrapin Station

According to Patricia Churchland (see this review of her book Touching a Nerve), a mammal's care for its young is the biological root of morality. And over time that has evolved into more universal principles.

Conceptually, we make the distinction between morally good and bad actions in observation. Compare, for example, Alice saving a person from falling off a cliff versus Bob pushing a person over a cliff. We might want to avoid being around Bob (at least near cliffs). That's the kind of pragmatic distinction that creates the use for realist moral language.

. It can be a fact that I believe the earth is flat. — Andrew4Handel

Apparently you don't really understand the distinction between things we believe that "parallel" facts that are external to us and things we think that aren't "parallel" with anything external to us.

If someone is psychologically harmed because they are prevented from beating their girlfriend — Andrew4Handel

And you don't care what the girlfriend desires, how she feels about it, etc. either? You only care about her getting hit, regardless of how she feels about that?

An apple is considered to be made up of atoms but an atom is not identical to an apple. — Andrew4Handel

Is an atom "the same thing" as an apple?

However my original point was that people do not accept your physicalist premise which seems to underlie your belief that morality isn't objective. — Andrew4Handel

The two actually have no correlation to each other.

According to Patricia Churchland (see this review of her book Touching a Nerve), a mammal's care for its young is the biological root of morality. And over time that has evolved into more universal principles.

Conceptually, we make the distinction between morally good and bad actions in observation. Compare, for example, Alice saving a person from falling off a cliff versus Bob pushing a person over a cliff. We might want to avoid being around Bob (at least near cliffs). That's the kind of pragmatic distinction that creates the use for realist moral language. — Andrew M

So I'm confused how you're using "realist" and "real" then.

So I'm confused how you're using "realist" and "real" then. — Terrapin Station

How so? If Bob pushes someone of a cliff (ceteris paribus), then what he did was morally wrong. Bob's opinion or approval of it isn't relevant.

Bob's opinion or approval of it isn't relevant. — Andrew M

How did you get to this claim. It's coming out of nowhere.

If you're not using "real" in an unusual way, you did zero work above to support the idea.

How did you get to this claim. It's coming out of nowhere. — Terrapin Station

I'm contrasting it with what I understand your view to be. That Bob's action is moral if he approves of it. Or have I misunderstood your view?

If you're not using "real" in an unusual way, you did zero work above to support the idea. — Terrapin Station

I'm describing a conventional use which is based in observation. What work are you looking for?

That Bob's action is moral if he approves of it. Or have I misunderstood your view? — Andrew M

Bob's action is moral to Bob if he approves of it. X is always moral or immoral (or whatever else on the spectrum, including morally neutral) to someone, to some individual.

I'm describing a conventional use which is based in observation. What work are you looking for? — Andrew M

What I had said was "if you have a suggestion about how how we could have a 'realist' ethics, I'll take a critical look at it and comment." In other words, some sort of support for how a realist ethics could be possible, ontologically. I was looking for what you took to be a support, and then I would critically assess it. That people think of ethics as something real ontologically (and it's a dubious claim that most people think of it that way) isn't a support for it being real. People can have misconceptions, false beliefs, etc.

Bob's action is moral to Bob if he approves of it. X is always moral or immoral (or whatever else on the spectrum, including morally neutral) to someone, to some individual. — Terrapin Station

Yes, so we have two different models for using moral terms. On my model, whether or not Bob's action is moral is independent of whether anyone approves of it or thinks it is moral - which is what makes it a realist model.

What I had said was "if you have a suggestion about how how we could have a 'realist' ethics, I'll take a critical look at it and comment." In other words, some sort of support for how a realist ethics could be possible, ontologically. I was looking for what you took to be a support, and then I would critically assess it. That people think of ethics as something real ontologically (and it's a dubious claim that most people think of it that way) isn't a support for it being real. People can have misconceptions, false beliefs, etc. — Terrapin Station

I'm showing, via the Alice and Bob scenario, the meaning and application of moral terms on my model. Just as I might point at a red apple and say that that is what I mean by "apple" or the color property "red".

Then, abstracting from similar scenarios that we would ordinarily regard as moral, what they seem to have in common is that they are behaviors that promote life and well-being.

No thanks Sapientia. You've already made up your mind. — creativesoul

Yes, I have. I'm confident that I'm right, and I just can't bring myself to sift through your confused ramblings.

Yes, so we have two different models for using moral terms. On my model, whether or not Bob's action is moral is independent of whether anyone approves of it or thinks it is moral - which is what makes it a realist model. — Andrew M

I'm not presenting a model per se. I'm describing what's really going on ontologically. Are you simply avoiding claims about what's really going on ontologically?

Part of the reason I'm focusing on what's really going on ontologically is that it's necessary for epistemological purposes here, especially when there's a disagreement and anyone is claiming that someone else is simply wrong a la getting something incorrect/inaccurate.

Facts are not standard-relative because they're determined by what's the case, unless that's a standard, in which case it would be the only standard, and it would be objective and universal. Morality is standard-relative because it's determined primarily by how we feel, and how we feel varies, and it is subjective and relative. The truth in morality consists in how we truly feel about moral issues. We both agree that seeking moral truth in the objective sense is a wild goose chase.

Facts are what has happened. — creativesoul

So it's not a fact that I'm standing here right now? What's happening right now hasn't already happened. That would be absurd. So it can't be a fact under your ill-considered definition. But that's also absurd, because it is a fact.

Conclusion: reject your ill-considered definition and replace it with a superior one.

Facts are what's the case. It's the case that I'm standing here right now. Therefore, that I'm standing here right now is a fact.

You're welcome.

I'm contrasting it with what I understand your view to be. That Bob's action is moral if he approves of it. Or have I misunderstood your view? — Andrew M

It's a common misunderstanding. You aren't the first, and you won't be the last. Even a dinosaur like Banno has these kind of misunderstandings.

Facts are not standard-relative because they're determined by what's the case, unless that's a standard, in which case it would be the only standard, and it would be objective and universal. Morality is standard-relative because it's determined primarily by how we feel, and how we feel varies, and it is subjective and relative. The truth in morality consists in how we truly feel about moral issues. We both agree that seeking moral truth in the objective sense is a wild goose chase. — S

Could it not be the case that we truly feel wrongly about a moral issue, though? Or no?

What is truly feeling, as opposed to feeling? Or do you mean that we can be deceptive to what we feel, and thus there is what we truly feel and what is only ephemeral or false?

In what way does that differ from approval? As you say just above I am misunderstanding you when I say that Bob's action is moral because he approves of it, so truly feeling cannot be the same thing as approval.

What is truly feeling?