Moral realists (or 'objectivists') have nothing more to support their claim than "it is not ruled out as an option".
I think parsimony (a principle I find mostly useful), would suggest relativism, as realism needs some objective truth-maker and we don't seem to be able to reach any kind of idea of what that might be. All that happens is the can gets kicked further down the subjective road.
A moral claim is taken to be correct if it somehow 'accounts for' everyone's intuitions - how do we judge if it's 'accounted' for them? Turns out that's just a subjective 'feeling' that it has.
This is a matter of principle vs practice again. Anything that can have any causal effect on something else is in principle capable of communicating with it, even if in practice they have no conventional obvious communication ability. (There are some amazing hacks that can get information off of computers not connected to any network, or monitor speech in a room with a computer with no microphone, etc, by using overlooked tiny effects between hardware and software, for example). If two things are causally isolated such that in principle no information about one of them can reach anything that can reach the other one, then from each of their perspectives the other seems not to exist at all, so they’re basically in separate universes.
We necessarily imagine from some perspective or another though. If we imagine a world where we don’t exist, we imagine a world that doesn’t contain us as we really are, from some disembodied viewpoint. When we’re imagining the three men and the elephant, we’re imagining it from some viewpoint where we can observe all four of them. But if there isn’t actually any such viewpoint possible, because they’re all so completely isolated from each other, then all we should be imagining is each of their separate viewpoints, from which none of the others can ever seem to exist, nor the whole elephant, so what would it mean to claim that those things do exist, in some way that will never make any noticeable difference to anyone?
Conditional imperatives make perfect sense. It helps to remember that material implication is equivalent to a kind of disjunction: “if P then Q” is exactly equivalent to “Q or not P”. I can easily command someone to do Q or not do P, which is the logical equivalent of ordering them to do Q if they do P, or “if you do P, do Q”, without any kind of embedding trouble. It might look like there should be in the “if-then” form, but there’s clearly none in the “or” form which is identical to it.
It might also help to resolve the appearance of the problem if we factor the “be()” out to the whole conditional at once:
be(the saints being praised only if the demons being not praised)
or
be(the demons being not praised or the saints being not praised)
If that were a problem, then every account of what people are doing with words would be subject to the same problem. If you take an ordinary indicative sentence to be reporting a fact, as you say, that’s still doing something, but in the antecedent of a conditional is it still doing that same fact-reporting? Whatever solution allows ordinary conditionals to work there, it should also work for whatever else other kinds of speech are doing, so long as there is a “truth-value” that can be assigned to that kind of speech, i.e. each such utterance is either a correct or incorrect utterance of that kind.
I think most people would (quite rightly) judge him 'ill', not 'wrong'. That's the point I was making about intuitive feelings of morally apt behaviour. They're just not relevant to actual moral dilemmas about which there's disagreement. The kind these 'moral systems' are aimed at. People supporting moral realism always seem to cite the agreement that would be had over some over-the-top act of evil, but ask yourself why have you had to choose such an example, and when was the last time you faced such a moral dilemma ("should I bash the people's skulls in or not?")? The answer to both will come down to the fact that real moral dilemmas are not solvable by relation to the instincts that we all share about empathy, care, and cooperation.
Possibly, yes. If it works I cannot see any reason why not. If he gets lucky a lot how are we calculating that it is just luck. If a coin lands on heads most of the time we presume a biased coin, not a lucky one.
Yes, I suppose you could claim that, but it gets very difficult when it comes to the more advanced areas of maths, logic, and science. You could well argue that assuming the stone follows some physical law when it drops to the ground is just a post hoc rationalisation for my gut feeling that it would, but I don't see how you could argue that the energy level predicted of the Higgs Boson being found where the theory expected it to be was just a post hoc rationalisation of our gut feeling that it would be there.
I don't have any disagreement with all this. It's not far off the way I imagine our judgements to be made. None of this defeats relativism (there's nothing about something 'seeming' to one person to be the case, even on reflection, that makes it more likely to actually be the case).
Intentions, as I mean them, are "second-order desires", in the same way that beliefs are "second-order perceptions", though neither in quite so straightforward a way, hence the quotes here. "Thoughts" in general (beliefs and intentions) are, on my account, what happens when we turn our awareness and control inward, look at our "feelings" (desires and perceptions) and then judge whether they are correct or not. To think something is good and to intend it are thus synonymous: the thing that you think is good, that you intend, is the thing that you judge it would be correct for you to desire.
Bearing in mind that if there is no way in principle of them communicating with each other or anything they have mutual access to, then on what grounds could you say they even exist together in the same world?
When we imagine this, we're imagining that you and I have some kind of privileged access where we're aware of all three of them and of the elephant, but they're all absolutely blocked off from awareness of each other or of any part of the elephant besides their tiny little bit. But if we can interact with them (to observe them), and with the whole of the elephant (to observe it), then in principle there is a communication channel, through us, by which they could observe each other and the whole of the elephant.
E.g. if the dead bugs say "I don't like your hat", but there isn't actually anybody who doesn't like anyone's hat who wrote that, the dead bugs just look like that sentence, what meaning should a reader take away from it? Who should they feel insulted by? Nobody, because nobody actually wrote that.
Sure, if they take Moore's sentence to mean "I believe X but I don't believe X" or "X is true but X is false" or something like that, then they can take it to be contradictory. My account of impression/expression is an account of why it seems like it shouldn't seem contradictory, but nevertheless it does seem contradictory, i.e. why this is a "paradox" and not just an obvious either contradiction or non-contradiction. Someone who took Moore's sentence to mean one of the things above wouldn't see anything paradoxical about it, but people generally do, so some explanation of the differences and relations in meaning between "I believe X" and "X is true" is needed to account for why they do.
Remember that "be(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". Likewise "is(x being F)" is a shorter form of something like "it-is-the-case-that-there-is(x being F)". These are meant to be equivalent to "x ought to be F" and "x is F"; we're just pulling the "is"-ness and "ought"-ness out into functions that we apply to the same object, the same state of affairs, "x being F".
So if "if x ought to be F, then..." is no problem, then "if be(x being F), then ..." should be no problem either, because the latter is just an encoding of the former in a formal language meant to elucidate the relations between "is" and "ought" statements about the same state of affairs.
I take "oughts" to be a kind of generalization of imperatives: "you ought to F" and "you, F!" are equivalent on my account, but you can say things of the form "x ought to be G" that can't be put into normal imperative form. "Oughts" are more like exhortations than imperatives: "Saints be praised!" isn't an order to the saints to go get praised, but it is basically the same as a general imperative to everyone (but nobody in particular) to "praise the saints!" and also basically the same as "the saints ought to be praised", which likewise implies that everybody (but nobody in particular) ought to "praise the saints!"
Perhaps we could more neutrally distinguish them as "cognitive truth" and "descriptive truth", since the most important feature of my moral semantics is rejecting descriptivism without rejecting cognitivism. On my account moral claims are "truth-apt" in the sense that matters for cognitivism, but not "not truth-apt" in the sense that matters for descriptivism. They're not telling you something about the way the world is, but they are nevertheless fit to be assigned yes/no, correct/incorrect, 1/0, "truth" values.
I would state the parallel principles instead as:
"X is descriptively true if and only if X satisfies all sensations / observations"
and
"X is prescriptively good if and only if X satisfies all appetites".
Claims that something is descriptively true or that something prescriptively good can both be "cognitively true" / correct in the same way, they can both carry boolean values that can be processed through logical functions.
The meanings, on my account, of ordinary non-moral claims, and moral claims, respectively, are to impress upon the audience either a "belief", an opinion that something is (descriptively) true, that it is, that reality is some way; or an "intention", an opinion that something is (prescriptively) good, that it ought to be, that morality is some way.
It's technically a different question as to what kinds of states of affairs can be real or can be moral, and then a further question still as to how we sort out which of such states of affairs actually is real or moral to the best of our limited abilities. Those are topics I intend to have later threads about: ontology and epistemology, and two halves of what's usually reckoned as normative ethics which I term "teleology" and "deontology".
The difference is that I'm not claiming "X is wrong" describes some kind of abstract moral property of wrongness of object X, and that on account of that property, we ought not to do X. I claim that "X is wrong" just means "X ought not happen", which in turn is a more general, universal form of sentences like "(everybody) don't do X" or "let X not happen!"
That black hole information paradox got solved in a way that the information wasn't actually lost, because the infalling particles have effects on the stuff happening right at the event horizon, which does eventually bring the information back to us in the form of Hawking radiation. It seems like lightspeed particles moving away from us at the edge of the universe could have some impact on the other stuff there at the edge of the universe that is still capable of communicating with us, and so information about that escaping stuff could still make its way back to us in principle.
I have a whole thing about the contingent facts about definitions (and, hence, analytic a posteriori facts) that I'm going to do a later thread about.
I plan to do a later thread on this topic, so I'll defer answering until then.
I think it's quite irrefutable that most people are either born with, or are predisposed to develop, a basic set of what we might call moral imperatives. We sense other's pain and try to minimise it, we sense other's intentions a try to help and we are drawn to to other people who appear to act the same.
To me, a moral dilemma is only a dilemma because the answer is not delivered to us automatically by those same set of basic instincts.
How do you imagine reasoning actually working here - step-by-step what does it do, do you think? Say I'm trying to decide whether to wear my coat The weather report says it's going to rain, but the sky looks clear and blue. I decide not to wear my coat and enjoy a sunny day without the extra burden. Was my decision right or wrong? How do I judge the quality of my reasoning prior to knowing the outcome?
So, the point here is that we'd never know. A moral system based on reasoning would be completely indistinguishable from one based on gut feeling because we'd have absolutely no way of telling if the reasoning is post hoc rationalisation of what we we're going to do anyway, or genuine reasoning.
what I find disturbing about all these "I've worked out how to decide what's moral or not" type of models (we seem to get a half dozen of them every week) is that they try to add a gloss of authority to moral resolutions which we have absolutely no way of distinguishing from gut feeling (or worse, political ideology).
I don't see any widespread agreement on those matters. Torturing someone for no reason, is just definitional,what distinguishes actions (the things to which the term 'moral' applies) are those reasons,and it's that matter over which there's so little agreement.
It is, but the evaluation includes the outcome in a way that evaluation of arguments doesn't.
To take your lottery example. Imagine you bought those thousand rickets and won a thousand times, you do the same next week and again the week after, the same thing happens. Is it still a bad decision, simply because it 'ought to be' on the basis of the evidence? Clearly the success of the outcome must cause us to review our assessment of the decision, we must have got something wrong somewhere.
In addition, what we believe are reasoned decisions are very often not. Even High Court Judges hand down longer sentences when they're hungry than they do when they're not.
No, I suspected not. Perhaps that's for another day though.
I can't think if a single moral fact that everyone agrees on, and not many that are agreed even by a large majority. I can say, however, that virtually everyone in the world agrees on the physical properties of tables, or the physical functioning of a cup. That solid things cannot pass through other solid things, that large objects do not fit inside smaller ones...etc.
I'm interested in how you come to believe (and defend) whatever it is you believe.
To answer your question though - I think more well-reasoned arguments are better arguments by definition. The measure we usually use to determine 'better' when it come to arguments is the the quality of the reasoning (a subjective judgement, I might add, but nonetheless the case).
Decisions, however, are not usually judged 'better' on the strength of their reasons, they're usually judged on the evaluation of their outcome, so the two are different.
Then whence the notion "It is not an impasse like you would expect if people's disagreements were just brute expressions."? It seems like an impasse, and you were previously imploring that we treat things the way they seem to be until we have good reason to believe otherwise.
Do you have any reason to believe this?
Isn't it? You expect the dispute about abortion to be resolved any minute do you? What an endearing sense of optimism you have!
1) Decisions which we call 'moral' ones are actually a very wide range of decision-types involving (sometimes very different) areas of the brain. I'm loathe to make absolute statements, but one I think I could stand by is that moral decision-making definitely is not one unified thing. It is several disparate and possibly even mutually exclusive processes depending on the exact nature of the decision. we do not involve the same process in deciding to care for a baby as we do in deciding to give to charity.
2) The processes used for for any given decision-type vary across people, ages and circumstance. At any given time a decision might be made on the basis or norm-following, rules, consequences, emotion, empathy... At any given time this decision might be something we're consciously aware of, or something we're process sub-consciously.
Who's this 'we' and from where are you getting your assessment of usually? I certainly don't, and neither do any of my colleagues. We wouldn't get very far understanding the role of things like social influence or group identity if we just presumed everyone meant exactly what they said. If someone after work tells you the would 'kill for a beer' are you concerned for their sanity, or do you presume they didn't literally mean what they said?
That's begging the question. Their surface level speech already matches what they claim it means, that's why they claim it means it. Why would they match their surface level speech to what cognitivists claim it means? If "You shouldn't murder" means "Boo Murder!", then the expressivist has nothing to change in their surface level speech, "You shouldn't murder" means exactly what they intend it to.
And we have plenty of them. People have been studying this for hundreds of years, we're not coming to it fresh just now. Have you read the works of any expressivist philosophers? What is it that you think the pages are full of if not reasons? Are they to you just a series of blank pages with ",,,and therefore expressivism" at the end?
Just mentioning the name of a problem doesn't really help anyone understand why you think it's applicable. Do you think expressivist philosophers are unaware of the Frege-Geach problem? If not, then presumably they don't think it makes their position less tenable, and they presumably have their reasons. So what's relevant here is not merely the existence of a reason to find their position untenable, it's why you find that reason compelling.
Again, you're just making an assumption that the manner of speech dictates how the world is. when someone is determining whether the leaf is green, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is barely involved, neither is the insular cortex. Both are heavily involved in judging something like murder being wrong. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is responsible for regulation of emotional affect and the insular cortex is involved in feelings of disgust and visceral somatosensation. If the question "is murder wrong" was like the question "is the leaf green" then why would completely different brain regions be involved?
So why would we presume now that it's grammatical structure had the same meaning? When determining whether to murder someone (or commit some other immoral act) one does not consult one's database of actions to see what property this particular one has attached to it, one consults a wide variety of emotional responses. So, if that's what's actually happening when we make moral choices, then why would our moral talk be all about assigning properties to behaviours, properties which are barely consulted when they consider one of those behaviours?
I’m just some isolated guy who wants to actually talk to other people about the philosophical system I’ve been brewing for a decade instead of just writing it down in my book that nobody will ever read.
The distinction I make between desire and intention is important here. Being a slave to your vices is a case of your intentions not being causally effective on your actions, e.g. you mean to do something, you think you ought to, you resolve to do that, but despite that you just can't help but do otherwise, because other desires besides the desire you desire to desire override it.
This is analogous to mirages and optical illusions. Sometimes you perceive something, and you know that perception is false, you judge that your perception is incorrect, but that doesn't stop you from perceiving it anyway. You perceive something you don't believe. Likewise you can desire something you don't intend. As just like you might not help but act on some perceptions even though you disbelieve them (e.g. recoiling from a scary hallucination you know isn't real), so too you might not help but act on some desires you don't intend to.
In the case of the gym example, if you honestly don't intend to go to the gym, rather than just not desiring to and expecting those slothful desires to win out, then that would suggest that you think there is some greater good than going to the gym that you would be neglecting, so you think you going to the gym today is not actually good (because in the full context you think doing so would be worse than not doing so), even if you think going to the gym generally is good.
The truthmakers of moral claims, on my account, are the appetitive experiences of things seeming good or bad in the first-person. Not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad. Just like the truthmakers of factual claims, on my account, are the sensory experiences of things seeming true or false in the first-person, not the sensory experiences of other people seeming, in the third person, to be having experiences of things seeming good or bad.
This avoids solipsism or egotism, as I expect you'll object next, because you can either trust other people that they had the first-person appetitive experiences that they claimed to have, or go have those same experiences yourself if you don't trust them. In either case, it's that first-person experience that is the truth maker, not any third-person account of a fact that someone's brain is undergoing some process.
Who or how many people is not relevant. But in any case bloodlust or sadism as usually defined would be desires, not appetites. Someone desires to kill or hurt someone else. That doesn't mean that a complete moral account has to grant them what they desire. But whatever raw experiences they're having that give rise to those desires, whatever kind of psychological pain or whatever may be behind it, those are appetites, and need to be satisfied.
Consider natural numbers for analogy. There is no natural number that could not, in principle, be counted up to. But we can never finish counting all of the natural numbers. No matter how many we count, there will still be infinitely many that we haven't yet counted. But those are still nevertheless in principle countable: if we keep counting we will eventually count any number you'd care to name, but there will always still be more that we haven't counted yet.
If there was truly absolutely no way in principle to ever tell anything about the object they're feeling than the things they "mistakenly" feel, then yes, those things would actually not be mistakes.
It's important to keep distinct things that are "practically impossible" and things that are really and truly impossible in principle. There are lots of cases where it's "practically impossible" to verify something, but still actually possible in principle, and it's that in-principle that makes the difference. If you extend the "practical impossibility" to ridiculous lengths, you end up getting ridiculous-sounding conclusions, and if you take it impossibly far all the way to complete actual impossibility, you get ridiculous conclusions like these three men existing in actually separate worlds.
In reading the message written in dead bugs, we necessarily interpret it as though it was an utterance. Part of what makes something an impression or an expression is the interpretation of the audience; really, it's more the audience's interpretation than the speaker's intention that conveys any kind of communication at all.
So if you read what seems to be an impression written in dead bugs that happen to have died in that pattern, and you read it as an impression, not just as a meaningless pattern of dead bugs, then to you it is an impression.
Likewise, in my logic, every ordinary indicative descriptive sentence "x is F" can be turned into "is(X being F)" and all the same rules of logic will apply to them. But if there was another sentence "x is G" where G is a predicate meaning that what it's applied to ought to be F, instead of treating that as a completely unrelated sentence, we could render it as "be(X being F)". You can do the exact same rules of logic to that re-encoding as you would with "x is G", but you can also see relationships between that statement and the statement "x is F" and generally other statements about x being F.
I don't have any problem with talking about "truth" in the broader sense that you are. I only substitute "correctness" because to some people, "truth" implies descriptiveness, and I want to avoid confusion with them. You're absolutely right that there's two concepts here, a narrower one and a broader one, and I don't have any particular attachment to the terms used for them, just so long as they are distinguished from each other.
The narrower concept, though, is not specifically "physical truth", but "descriptive truth". On my physicalist account, those are identical, but for the purposes of logic, they don't have to be. Saying that there exist some abstract moral objects is a descriptive, but not physical, claim. It would be made true by reality being a certain way, by it being an accurate description of reality. Likewise any kind of claim about the existence of any nonphysical things: they're still claims that things are, really some way.
There are other kinds of claims that don't purport to describe how reality is at all, though; most notable, prescriptive claims, that something ought to be, morally. I think that those kinds of claims can also be true in a sense, but a non-descriptive sense; hence I try to say "correct" instead of "true" to avoid possible implications of descriptivism
(Besides its conflict with my physicalism, I would still object to moral non-naturalism because it's still a form of descriptivism, and so still tries to draw an "ought" from an "is": there are these abstract moral objects, therefore things ought to be like so-and-so.)
Something like it yes, but not exactly that. My fork would have three tines. In the middle are the relations between ideas, without any attitude toward them, neither claiming those ideas are correct to describe reality with nor correct to prescribe morality with, just that those ideas have those relations to each other.
I think the thing I said earlier in this post about distinguishing practical possibility from in-principle possibility addresses this.
(I spent that entire thread trying to disengage with Isaac and never got around to actually presenting an argument for those principles, but if you want to ask about them over there, I will).
I know I'm weird in not sharing the inherent sense of outrage about "infidelity" that other people have, and it's not because I want to run off and do it with other people myself, but because I'm just honestly not a possessive person. I've been in open relationships before and not felt jealous, unless it actually had negative consequences for me (like, she wants to go spend more time with him and leave me alone and lonely). If you got rid of all the negative consequences -- which may not always, in practice, actually be possible -- then I don't see how it would be a genuinely bad thing.
This is where a lot of my core principles come from. When we get down to questions that we cannot possibly find an answer to, but cannot help but implicitly assume some answer or another by our actions, we have to assume whichever way is most practically useful to finding other answers.
(there are practical reasons to reject reducing "is" to "ought" or vice versa, which rules out translating moral utterances to descriptions of reality, be it a natural or non-natural part of it).
So, on what basis are you judging 'best' here? What aspects does this explanation have which, say expressivism, doesn't have?
Well then those are not properties of the behaviour in question, they are properties of those regarding it. I suppose you could say that a property of slavery is that such-and-such a group of people think it's bad, but that seems like an unnecessarily clumsy way of just avoiding assigning the property to the person rather than the behaviour.
Then on what grounds are you dismissing methods?
what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts".
Maybe (although not in my experience), but you advanced this as evidence of us ascribing properties to objective entities (like slavery), so in the case of relativists they would not be ascribing the property 'wrong' but the property 'something I believe is wrong'. In order to take moral realism as prima facie true on the basis of it seeming to be how we talk about moral dilemmas, you'd have to present evidence of us mostly talking about moral dilemmas assuming realism, and that's just not the case.
But this would seem to support the opposite of what you're saying. We advance reasons whilst talking about how good certain movies despite virtually all of us being of the opinion that movie preferences are subjective. So what this example demonstrates is that our mode of conversation (reasoned argument) and our use of terms like 'best' does not in any way indicate that we consider the underlying judgment to be objective. It's just the way we talk.
I might have your position confused then, I thought you were arguing against moral relativism. I'm a relativist myself, so we're in agreement here.
Then what should?(serve as a guiding principle for determining what is true)
As I raised with Pforrest earlier, this is simply not true so as a basis for believing prima facie in moral truths it's sketchy at best.
Currently, a significant number of surveys show most people to be moral relativists (or at least not moral absolutists).
Even if this were not the case, however, what you'd be setting up here is the principle that we should, no matter the absence of mechanism, no matter the lack of parsimony, take as true whatever it is that most people believe to be true. "Most people believe there are objective moral facts, therefore we should assume there are objective moral facts".
You have, however, in your assessment of those very moral facts just discarded the idea that what most people believe to be the truth about those moral facts is indeed the truth about those moral facts. This is a contradictory approach on the face of it.
Likewise we could go the other way and ask whether most people believe prima facie that "what most people believe should be taken as being the case". I've no surveys to go on here, but I'd wager not many would agree with that, so even if it were true that "most people believe there are moral facts", adhering to our first principle would mean that we should not take this as reason to believe that there are moral facts.
The moral equivalent of that paradox would be the sentence "x is good but I don't intend x". It seems to me that what you intend and what you think are good are as inseparable as what you believe and what you think is true. It is possible to intend other than what is good, just like it's possible to believe other than that is true, but in saying something is good you implicitly express your intention that it be so, and so contradict the attendant explicit expression of intention otherwise.
This is the issue that I've been having trouble communicating to Kenosha and Isaac. I don't hold these "oughts" to be grounded in any "is". We can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something ought to be, just like we can give a descriptive account of the cause of someone feeling or thinking that something is, but that account is not the reason why they feel or think that. We don't have to know anything at all about brains to go to our appetitive experiences as the ground of our "oughts", any more than we need to know about brains to go to our sensory experiences as the ground of our "is"s.
In the latter case it's rather transparently the other way around: we learn descriptive facts about brains empirically, by relying on our sensations, our "is" experiences. If we then used our knowledge about brains, gained through sensory observation, to justify using sensory observation, that would clearly be circular reasoning. The reliance on sensory experience comes prior to any description of the brain. Likewise, on my account the reliance on appetitive experience as the ground for prescription comes prior to any description of the brain.
I'm not sure this is an accurate account of my account, because there could be differences between people that would make them have different appetites in the same situation. A moral claim is objectively true if it accounts for all of those different appetites in all different circumstances.
It's precisely that "idealized" that makes the difference. We don't, and can't, have a complete account of the way that the entire (possibly infinite) world would be experienced by all (possibly infinitely many) kinds of being. We only have the way that bits and pieces of it are experienced by beings like us. So we can't just take "the whole world, independent of all experience" (that non-existent noumena) and hold it up against "our picture of what the world should be like". We can only compare "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it is" and "the way this bit of the world seems to us like it ought to be".
That last bit. The parable of the blind men and the elephant is the illustration I like to use here. Three blind men each feel different parts of an elephant (the trunk, a leg, the tail), and each concludes that he is feeling something different (a snake, a tree, a rope). All three of them are wrong about what they perceive, but the truth of the matter, that they are feeling parts of an elephant, is consistent with what all three of them sense, even though the perceptions they draw from those sensations are mutually contradictory.
But if not, then you wouldn't want to translate that second premise as "x not stealing implies x not cheating" (gerund, equally applicable to descriptions or prescriptions, just stating a relationship between those states of affairs), but rather as "'x ought to not steal' implies 'x ought to not cheat'". Symbolically, that would then be:
P1. be(A)
P2. be(A) -> be(B)
C. be(B)
On my account, it's not only moral utterances but ordinary descriptive utterances that are impressing an attitude toward the idea in question.
I didn't realize I was using a customized version of the word; I honestly just thought "supererogatory" was the deontic equivalent of "contingent". Doing some further research now prompted by this, I see that the word I really want is "omissible". I'll make sure to use that instead from now on, and change where I've mis-used "supererogatory" in the past where possible.
Quantum physics is full of different interpretations, so I'm cautious to speak authoritatively about what all physicists think, but as I understand it, the uncertainty principle doesn't just say that we can't know position and speed at the same time, but that to the extent that we measure one, the other becomes literally undefined. A particle with a definite momentum has no definite position; its position is actually smeared out across space.
To other observations. We're (rightly) cautious about the accuracy of our present beliefs because we haven't made all of the observations (and never can), and there may be ones that contradict what we presently believe. To assert that something is objectively true is to assert that there won't ever be any contradictory observations. We can never know that with certainty, of course, but we can think it is so, at least tentatively.
Causality, like physicality, is part of the background assumption of objectivity that we have to make in order to go about the process of investigating what is real. We can't empirically prove that anything is objectively real, either, but the question of whether anything is objectively real is prior to the empirical investigation. Likewise, the question of whether anything causes anything else. Empirical investigation helps us sort out what kinds of things cause what other kinds of things, on the assumption that things cause other things in the first place and all our experiences aren't willy-nilly incomprehensible.
According to current physics, that information does still exist in the universe, and so in principle those things are empirically verifiable, it's just ridiculously impractical to go about doing that verification.
This is why I only embrace verificationism explicitly within the narrow domain of descriptive truths. The principle of verificationism itself is not a description of the way the world is, but is something we settle on prior to even engaging in description.
The information about the cheating still exists out there in the world threatening the harm of its knowledge to the man. If it were possible (which it's not) to change the world such that all information about the cheating was completely eradicated, then that would be equivalent to changing the world to be one in which the cheating had never happened.
If it were the case that such a person could never encounter anything about the world that would be counter to this belief, then that belief would either actually be true, or just be empty.
If you mean abstract moral objects specifically, then what explanatory power do they have?
Nope! Two different orthogonal divides, the distinction between which is critical to my account. Direction of fit is about the kind of opinion (descriptive or prescriptive), and impression vs expression is about what you’re doing with that opinion relative to someone else (just showing them what opinion is in your mind, or trying to change the opinion in their mind). You can impress or express either kind of opinion, descriptive or prescriptive. If anything, expression is more description-like because it merely shows what your opinions are (so is like describing your opinions), while impression is more prescription-like because it tells someone to have certain opinions (so is like prescribing your opinions). But they are still orthogonal: you can express your beliefs, impress your beliefs, express your intentions, or impress your intentions.
I must admit I have noted this apparent asymmetry before and struggled to reckon with it. It makes me feel like there is something I haven't fully developed right. When it comes to my approaches to assessing the correctness of either beliefs or intentions, I do end up with a nice symmetry again, but it feels like some bridge between the symmetry of meanings and the symmetry of assessment is missing, for the reasons you state. So I'm glad we're talking about it, because this is the kind of situation where I usually come up with newer, better thoughts.
The symmetry I end up with for assessing the correctness of either kind of opinion is checking the opinion against experiences, where experiences come in different varieties that carry their own direction of fit: experiences with mind-to-world fit are sensations (like sight and sound), and experiences with world-to-mind fit are appetites (like pain and hunger). In both cases, assessment of the objective correctness of an opinion needs to account for not just the experiences you are actually having right here and now, but all the experiences anyone could have in any context.
I think perhaps the missing bridge that avoids the asymmetry you note -- and this is just me thinking on the fly here, not recounting thoughts I've already had before, so thank you again for prompting some new thought -- is that direction of fit needs to be reckoned not so much as a relationship between the mind and the world, as it usually is, but rather as a relationship of these different descriptive and prescriptive models to our overall function from our experiences to our behavior. We don't have direct access to the world, all we have is the experience of our interactions with the world, what it does to us and what we do to it.
Being interactions between ourselves and the world, our experiences of either kind are about both ourselves and the world: sensations tell us about how things look to beings like us in certain circumstances, appetites tell us about how things feel to beings like us in certain circumstances. The direction of fit is more between those self-regarding and world-regarding aspects of the experience, internal to the experience, than between the mind and the world itself.
This doesn't seem to be a logically necessary premise in the same was as "if stealing is wrong, getting your little brother to steal is wrong". So it makes sense that you wouldn't reconstruct that in the same way as the brother implication, as "(stealing) implies (cheating)", because that's incorrect; there could be stealing and not cheating.
For the same reason that "false" is contained within "contingent": supererogatory = not-obligatory, and all bad things are not-obligatory, just like contingent = not-necessary, and all false things are not-necessary. (There are some things that are necessarily false, but that just means impossible; likewise, things that are "obligatorily bad", so bad you are obliged not to do them, are just impermissible).
I disagree. When it comes to the limited domain of descriptive propositions, I agree completely with the verificationist theory of truth: a claim that something is true of the world yet has absolutely no empirical import is literally meaningless nonsense. If something like gods can really be said to exist, there must be something observable about them.
The prescriptivity involved there is still ultimately the same kind as moral prescriptivity, though. It's basically a case of considering what the proper function of a human mind is -- proper as in good, good as in prudential good, which we've already established boils down to moral good -- and then looking upon yourself in the third person, so to speak, and thinking "Hey, there's a mind! Is it functioning properly? No no, it should be perceiving like this and desiring like that instead..." It's self-parenting. Parents teach their kids how to think, both in terms of figuring out what is true and in terms of figuring out what is good, for the moral good of those kids, and everyone they'll have an impact on, right? Likewise, making sure we ourselves are thinking correctly is ultimately for a moral good too.
I say instead that moral utterances impress (and so implicitly also express; you caught the part about impression vs expression earlier?) intentions. And I say that intentions can be objectively correct or incorrect ("true" and "false" also frequently have descriptivist connotations, so I try to avoid them myself, but recognize their casual use). Both intentions and beliefs are subsets of what I call "thoughts" (as distinct from "feelings", "experiences", and other mental states), so the simplest rephrasing of the above would just be to say "John thinks ... while I think ..." instead, since the permissible/impermissible already carry subtler imperative force.
So in your modus ponens, the logical relationship is actually between "stealing happening" and "getting your little brother to steal": getting your little brother to steal entails stealing happening. So if it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(stealing happening)), and (getting your little brother to steal) entails (stealing happening), then it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is(not(getting your little brother to steal)).
You can replace it-ought-to-be-the-case-that-there-is with it-is-the-case-that-that-there-is and you get the same logical relations, just with descriptive force instead of prescriptive force.
I see prudential oughts as boiling down to a kind of moral ought. Taking care of yourself is a kind of moral good -- not necessarily an obligatory one, but still a moral one even if only supererogatory, you matter just like everybody else matters -- and instrumentally seeing to moral ends is still a kind of moral good. So you should stop smoking because if you don't you'll probably suffer and die, and people suffering and dying is bad.
Rational "oughts" I think can be better rephrased descriptively. "If you proportion your belief to the evidence your belief is more likely to be accurate." You might ask "but should beliefs be accurate?" and the answer to that is a trivial yes, because believing something just is thinking it's an accurate description of reality. If you didn't care to have an accurate description of reality, you wouldn't bother forming beliefs.
beliefs are to be judged by appeal to the senses, everyone's senses in all circumstances if they are to be judged objectively, and intentions are to be judged by appeal to the appetites, everyone's appetites in all circumstances if they are to be judged objectively.
They are instead pushing a considered thought about how everyone should think things ought to be, in the same way that descriptive statements are pushing a considered thought about how everyone should think things are.
I don't think you can accurately construe a soul-based theory as reductionism about the self. In what I've read, these types of theories don't say that the self is "reducible to" the soul, rather, it just IS the soul. This is less of a reduction and more of a plain definition. The self would not be a "product or manifestation of something more fundamental," as it would just BE the soul, and the soul would be brute and irreducible. I see an argument for construing those other positions as reductionist.All of these positions can be seen as reductionist, in that they treat personal identity as a product or manifestation of something more real or fundamental:
Psychological continuity
Physical (worldline) continuity
Structural similarity
Hidden essence (soul, etc.)
I agree with you to some extent. Our society places a lot of importance on personal identity, and this leads us to form the conceptions about it that we do. I believe many people hold false beliefs about the nature of themselves, due in large part to this sort of conditioning.I rather think that personal identity is a psychosocial construct. Consequently, it doesn't have a strict definition and delineation, but rather relies on intuitions and conventions that are to some degree fluid and diverse. This is why even those people who don't already have a favorite philosophical theory of self never seem to have a common opinion on such esoteric thought experiments as Davidson's Swampman, teleportation, duplication, etc.
Which is why it is so interesting to ask the questions!And since there is neither a prevailing philosophy nor a prevailing intuition or convention that would apply to such cases, answers vary.
I find this Humeanism vs Kantianism to be a false dichotomy, and moral expressivism vs moral realism to be a false dichotomy as well. I think, like the Humean, that there are no such things as "moral beliefs" per se, and that moral utterances do not have any meaning to be found in some description of reality; but I also think, like the Kantian, that moral utterances do much more than just express desires incapable of being correct or incorrect.
One important difference in attitude toward an idea is sometimes called "direction of fit", in reference to the terms "mind-to-world fit" and "world-to-mind fit". In a "mind-to-world fit", the mind (i.e. the idea) is meant to fit the world, in that if the two don't fit (if the idea in the mind differs from the world), then the mind is meant to be changed to fit the world better, because the idea is being employed as a representation of the world. In a "world-to-mind" fit, on the other hand, the world is meant to fit the mind (i.e. the idea), in that if the two don't fit (if the world differs from the idea in the mind), the world is meant to be changed to fit the mind better, because the idea is being employed as a guide for the world. It is the difference between a picture drawn as a representation of something that already exists, and a picture drawn as a blueprint of something that is to be brought into existence: it may be the same picture, but its intended purpose changes the criteria by which we judge it, and whether we judge the picture, or the thing it is a picture of, to be in error, should they not match.
given the idea of a world where some people kill other people, I expect most will agree that that idea is "right" in the sense that they agree with it as a description (most people, I expect, will agree that the world really is like that, and an idea of the world that doesn't feature such a thing is descriptively wrong), but simultaneously that it is "wrong" in the sense that they will disagree with it as a prescription (most people, I expect, will agree that the world morally oughtn't be like that — whatever "morally oughtn't" means to them, which we're getting to — and that a world that features such a thing is prescriptively wrong). Same idea, two different attitudes toward it: the world is that way, yes; but no, it oughtn't be that way. Two different opinions, but about the exact same thing, different not in the idea that they are about, but in the attitude toward that idea.
I take all kind of moral language, "good", "ought", "should", etc, to be conveying this kind of world-to-mind fit.
Saying that someone "ought" to do something, or that something "should" be or that it would be "good", doesn't necessarily mean it is obligatory. It could very well be a supererogatory good.
Correct ones of these non-descriptive but still cognitive opinions are not "facts" in the narrow sense, the sense that excludes mathematical claims. They could be called "facts" in a broader sense, but I find that that sense introduces unnecessary confusion, as "fact" seems to have inherently descriptivist connotations. The moral analogue of a "fact" is a "norm"; but NB that "norm" does not imply subjectivism, because "normal", "normative", etc, in their oldest senses, meant "correct" first and foremost, and it's only subjectivist assumptions that whatever everybody else is doing is correct that lead "normal" etc to take on the connotation of "what everyone else is doing". I don't mean it in that sense at all: a norm is just something that ought to be the case, exactly like a fact is something that is the case.
Describing and prescribing are different kinds of speech-actions, and so each have different criteria for doing them correctly, successfully, which when fulfilled make the statements true.
It cannot be correct to prescribe something that is logically contradictory, any more than it is correct to prescribe something that is logically contradictory. ("Ought" implies "can", as you say). Mathematics is about exploring the possibilities of different abstract structures, and the limits of that possibility limit what could be moral as much as they limit what could be real.
We can very well say that everybody ought to have access to adequate food and water and shelter and medicine etc, and nobody ever ought to have to die; those would be good states of affairs. Them being good states of affairs has some implications on what actions agents ought to do, but it's not directly a statement about what anyone ought to do.
The broad sense is just the sense of “a statement that is correct” in any sense. The narrow sense is the sense of “a statement describing the world, that is correct”. Mathematical statements have implications about what can be real (which descriptions of the world can be correct), but they also have implications about what can be moral (which prescriptions of the world can be correct). They are more abstract than either description or prescription, and no more directly say what is real than they directly say what is moral.
A classic example of a formal logical inference is that from the propositions "all men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" we can logically infer the proposition "Socrates is mortal". But, I hold, we could equally well infer from the propositions "all men ought to be mortal" and "Socrates ought to be a man" that "Socrates ought to be mortal". I say that it is really just the ideas of "all men being mortal" and "Socrates being a man" that entail the idea of "Socrates being mortal", and whether we hold descriptive, mind-to-fit-world attitudes about those ideas, or prescriptive, world-to-fit-mind attitudes about them, whether we're impressing or expressing those attitudes, even whether we're making statements or asking questions about them, does not affect the logical relations between the ideas at all.
I do actually support something like this, in the form of mathematicism (or the mathematical universe hypothesis), but for me that’s really an extension of modal realism: any world that can possibly be, is, both in terms of configurations of a universe with the mathematical structure that ours has, and in terms of other mathematical structures. But claims of possibility is not made true by their accurately describing these other possible worlds, but rather by the internal consistency of the structures they posit, and the other possible worlds are limited by that same requirement of self-consistency, so they necessarily coincide.
For those like me whose physicalist ontology cannot admit of some strange non-natural but nevertheless real moral facts, non-naturalism is a non-option. (This is also called the Argument from Queerness: wtf is a non-natural moral fact like?).