Two ways to use "morality". Both refer to codes of conduct. — creativesoul

Are you asserting that it's necessary to agree with Gert, by the way?

Is this really how you do philosophy as a "creative soul"--you find someone who you can verify is a professional in the field, read what they said, then treat it like gospel that everyone has to agree with?

And then we devolve into ad homs...

Wonderful.

I wasn't saying anything merely rhetorical. I was hoping you'd address all of that. The goal is to get your noggin working a bit better. To really do philosophy you need to think critically about stuff. That's what I'm trying to kickstart.

"To learn the breadth of what 'morality' conventionally refers to, you read the SEP page on it, and then you're done. Just repeat/paraphrase what you read there, and that's all you need to do."

it would simply be a case of me not agreeing — Terrapin Station

Which apparently you reserve unconditioned license to do. Or since everything is relative, agreement cannot have anything to do with things, because that would allow for something to be the case, which is exactly what you claim is relative. Whatever utility there may be in considering whether one particular thing is relative to another, you have pushed into absurdity and beyond into the ridiculous.

For Terrapin, Nothing is Wrong. The set of all wrong things is an empty set. There being no member of the class of wrong things, there is therefore no quality of wrongness, for such a quality would imply the existence of a wrong thing.

You live in a closed system.Parts of it may look like reality, but none of it is. You're a child or a crazy-man. Proof? Your post a little above this.

It's weird that he seemed to have no idea of the correct use of "objective", and that he didn't use logic, as others have done, in order to see why that definition would fail. Facts are clearly objective, and facts clearly don't change based on popular belief. Our planet didn't change from being flat to being spherical in sync with popular belief about it.

Dear oh dear. You disagree that all mental phenomena are subjective? Get outta town!

But Tim, please try to understand you have a giant burden that we simply don't have, and a giant burden that you've utterly failed to even come close to meeting. Dogmatism simply does not cut the mustard. Participants in this discussion do not have a burden to support what is obvious and agreed upon by both sides. So we do not have a burden to support that we feel strongly against murder, judge it to be wrong, and so on. It is your additional claims which require support, and after 43 pages, you still haven't provided any logical support. Going back through this discussion, one will find fallacy after fallacy from your side. It is frankly an embarrassment.

No, I wasn't referring to you. I don't know why you'd think that, given that you aren't childishly ignoring me. But thanks.

Indeed! Overcoming the initial prejudice, the superficial sense of absurdity, is a step in the right direction. It's not absurd at all when you actually think about it. When you actually think about it, the alternative is absurd. With my meta-ethical position, I can still say that murder is wrong, and that it's true that murder is wrong, and make sense. That is an advantage over your meta-ethical position, which can do the first two, but is committed to nonsense, so although you can say it is true, if it amounts to nonsense, it can't be. Moral absolutism is simply nonsense, it seems. How would you even attempt to explain it? Bearing in mind that dogmatic assertion is not explanation. You wouldn't, for example, accept someone dogmatically asserting that God exists, would you? You'd demand an explanation in support of the assertion, or else rightly dismiss it.

It would be interesting, to say the least, to see you attempt to argue that I cannot condone murder without implicitly condoning my own murder, given that that is simply illogical, given that obviously I would just implicitly make an exception of myself. I predict that your argument would beg the question and contain at least one false premise.

If it goes something like this:

If the categorical imperative...

Then it will instantly fail for begging the question, because we most certainly are not all Kantians, and we most certainly do not all accept the categorical imperative, and Kant is most certainly not God, and his writings on the subject are most certainly not Biblical.

As to the right/wrong of it, it is, most simply, answered by the thing itself. That is, not as a matter of preference, desire, or inclination, nor even on mere abstract reasoning. It rests on the thing itself, properly understood. — tim wood

This, in conjunction with your “my ownership of my life is absolute”, is the proof of the law serving the fundamental ground of moral interest. Murder, the thing itself, is properly understood as revoking the principle of ownership; some other rational agency has usurped the given right to exist. Revoking the ownership principle is logically equivalent to contradicting the law, and all contradictions are false if the affirmative is true. Therefore murder absolutely cannot be a positive moral interest to any rational agency, which makes yourself included explicit.

No objectivity, no relativity needed here, for it is absurd to consider any otherwise rationally competent agency would reject the ownership principle.

Yes, he started talking about reason, not wrongness, but even then, wrong-according-to-the-categorical-imperative is clearly not wrong-in-itself. It's a good thing that there are people such as yourself with their eye on the ball.

Hume's mistake is conflating simple, rudimentary, and/or basic thought/belief with the linguistically informed/ladened
— creativesoul

Might this hold some relevance to your thought/belief characterization? I’m still working on it, how I might find something comparable in my own mind. (I still need to separate them; it’s my cognitive bias at work....sorry) — Mww

Yes. No apology necessary. The position I argue from/for is not a conventional one.

The very conceptions of 'pure reason' and 'passions' that Hume employs stem from a gross misunderstanding of what all thought/belief consists of and how it all works. The result is clear. His conclusions are false.

“....Certain statements have strong existential implications; we might say that they are 'ontologically loaded." There is a tendency to equate the making of these statements with the making of an ontological commitment. But to do so would be a mistake, one that has prompted Quine to devise a formula to help keep our tendency in check. Quine draws a distinction between linguistic facts and ontological attitudes. The fact is, as Russell and Quine have pointed out, that statements can be meaningful without referring to anything. A person can play with linguistic objects to his or her heart's content without embracing any ontology that might be said to be "included" or "inherent" in the objects. We can tell stories about Pegasus without committing ourselves to its existence. Of course, with certain linguistic entities, the ontological implication can be strong, and the game can be dangerous. These days, we have quite happily accepted the Russell-Quine doctrine, and do not see ontological commitments in statements employing certain linguistic entities. We now accept that we only commit ourselves when we specifically give the variable a value....”
(A. T. Nuyen, 1985)

I personally find the categorization of philosophical subject matters much more of a problem than not. Talking about "ontological implications" is to identify that which is relevant to our classification of certain kinds of thought/belief. It leads nowhere useful if those classifications are grounded upon an inherently inadequate notion of thought/belief.

If one cannot replace the namesake with it's referent and carry on, then one doesn't know what s/he is talking about.

All correlation presupposes the existence of it's own content.

What's the point of a few Kantian's agreeing amongst themselves? That's not much of a debate, is it? I'm still waiting for the impossible, namely for someone to make sense of the nonsense of murder being wrong in itself.

It's your nonsense. You explain it.

:wink:

Yes, the ham-fisted invocation of objectivity, understood as opposed to subjectivity, in the arguments of the moral relativists is a category error. Morality is obviously an inter-subjective phenomenon, and even in the sciences, the closest we can come to objectivity is inter-subjective consensus.

Agreed. I’ve yet to experience ontological conditionals as anything but complicating, rather than clarifying. I mean...whatever I’m talking about must already be somehow, and must already relate to what I’m talking about....or I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. AAARRRGGGGG!!!!!!

As to Hume, given that we understand things better nowadays, can we say he did the best with what he had to work with? Even without admitting that it only took 50 years to blow his whole scheme out of the water......still.....

SLAM DUNK!!!!

(Sorry....UDub just got smacked by UNC in March Madness....so I’m a little under the influence.)

You really should stop mischaracterising those you're debating. No one here is saying that nothing is wrong in the unqualified way that you just said it. I shouldn't have to point out that moral relativists and emotivists are not moral nihilists. We accept that there is right and wrong.

:cool:

Which apparently you reserve unconditioned license to do. Or since everything is relative, agreement cannot have anything to do with things, because that would allow for something to be the case — tim wood

Again, in my opinion the definition is too narrow, because it would amount to ignoring a significant portion of the phenomena that people typically characterize as morality, moral stances, etc. It's the case that people commonly refer to other things, too, by those terms. I'm not saying that we have to go with what folks explicitly have in mind regarding what they're referring to--especially because many people believe fictions, believe things that are incoherent, etc., and we want to talk about what's really going on, the phenomena that are actually occurring, but a definition of a term like this should be able to cover what most folks are functionally doing with the term in this regard. The suggested definition is far too narrow for that.

For Terrapin, Nothing is Wrong. — tim wood

That's not at all my view.

That it's not my view doesn't imply that I think there is something that is correct and incorrect for everything we can mention/talk about. I'm able to look at things a bit more nuanced than thinking that if one thing has a property, everything extant must have the same property. You should be able to do this, too, unless you think, for example, that ice cubes must be able to make toast just because a toaster can.

No, it's Tim's, for one. That's where this stems from, as far as I can tell. See his comment on the previous page. He strongly suggested that the acts of Stalin and others like him were wrong in themselves, and that this is not nonsense. He has thus far failed to explain this. I rightly reject it as nonsense. Where do you stand on this?

In case you forgot, I am fine with inter-subjectivity. So much for your "slam dunk". :rofl:

Morality is obviously an inter-subjective phenomenon, — Janus

Are you saying anything different ontologically with "intersubjective" other than the fact that people can interact with each other behaviorally, including that they can utter agreements, they can cooperate, etc.?

It is the epitome of black and white thinking. It's not just ham-fisted, it's ham-brained.

In case you forgot, I am fine with inter-subjectivity. — S

I'm fine with it, too, depending on how we define it, but the definition I'm fine with doesn't amount to much, and the definition I'm fine with doesn't actually cover moral judgments qua judgments. Third-person observable behavioral stuff isn't identical to mental stuff. Judgments are incorrigibly mental stuff.

SLAM DUUU--- wait, what? Oh. :snicker:

More like an own goal.

If you are the kind of moral relativist who claims that moral truths are relative only to individuals' preferences, then you are not "fine with inter-subjectivity", despite the fact that you might lack the subtly to realize that.

If you are the kind of moral relativist who claims that moral truths are relative only to individuals' preferences, then you are not "fine with inter-subjectivity", despite the fact that you might lack the subtly to realize that. — Janus

Again, it depends on what you're saying intersubjectivity amounts to, exactly.

I'm the sort of moral relativist who says that there are no moral truths, period. Subjective, intersubjective, objective, whatever. Truth value is a category error here.