(December 9, 2017 at 4:01 pm)Hammy Wrote: I think moral claims are true or false in the correspondence sense. We define morality first and then we see if something in reality corresponds to that definition. We don't have to be right or wrong about the definition itself. Definitions never work like that. We didn't have to define science the way it is, science just works well, that's the point. Scientists can't prove that the words they use are the correct way to define them. In fact scientists will even redefine and re-model things to suit their empirical research, and this is not a problem. The conceptualiation of 'health' can be changed and disagreed about and this doesn't mean that some things aren't more healthy than others. I think it's the same about morality. Sure, no one has to agree with my definition that something is immoral if it causes someone suffering overall in the long run . . . but I don't care if someone doesn't accept my definition. I don't have to prove that my definition is 'the right one' whatever that would even mean. Nor does answers in principle mean answers in practice, and nor does objective mean universal. Morality is objective, AFAIC, because after it's defined there are correct and incorrect answers to moral questions at least in principle based on that definition. And I don't think the notion that it's moral to help and immoral to hurt is any less intuitively a sound premise to start with than the one about health: that something is healthy if it is good for us and unhealthy if it is bad for us.
Healthiness just describes reality. The measurable effect of actions as it relates to a measurable goal. You can change the goal or the actions, but it's always observable. It's essentially the same as studying erosion. It's scientific in nature.
Is being healthy better than not being healthy however is a whole different thing. Because now the equation requires assigning values to states of being.
Suicide is an easy example. Is it unhealthy? If healthiness is the goal of staying alive, killing yourself is certainly not going to help achieve that goal.
But is suicide bad for you in a grander sense? For that to be true, we'd have to know if the value of the state of being dead is greater than the value of the state of being alive. As far as I know, neither of those things have a measurable value. Making this question nothing like the issue of healthiness.
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So you can say morality is helping people. Which is fine. And the definition can exist in that scope. You can measure actions and their effects on whether they increase other people's happiness, or whatever measurement you're looking for.
But you can't say it's better to be moral than immoral in the grander sense. Because that goes back to assigning values to states of being, and that's decidedly unscientific.
