Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[robvalue]

As for things like "justice", I consider them to be abstract concepts that we use to help us understand and process our environment. I don't believe they exist in the same way physical objects exist. There is no such thing as "objective justice", there can only be a logical adherence to some specific rules of justice that have been agreed. What counts as justice in the first place is highly subjective. Morality is just the same.

Do you think that logic or reason can be used to come up with specific rules or a specific system of justice? Of course wisdom knows when to suspend logic and reason so that cultural mores can play a part when creating a system of justice. But inasmuch as something is designed according to logic and reason it is not subjective.

In America, our system of government is laid out more or less according to the ideas of the English philosopher, John Locke insofar as we have a balance of powers 9three different branches) in our government. This system was chosen according to the dictates of reason... not somebody's personal opinion or sense of aesthetic.

Insofar as our system provides us with justice, justice is not subjective. It is the fruit of reason.

I think we're talking past each other quite a bit, and I'm not sure how to remedy the situation.

Justice, like morality, is not a well-defined concept to begin with. To come up with an objective system, which you can totally do, you have to lay out exactly what justice means, how it should manifest, and so on. You have to agree on that first, and the end result may be logical and objective in one sense, but is still subjective in that it depends on these initial definitions.

Who gets to say how exactly justice works? All we can do is discuss it, and come up with a best compromise. If there really was some sort of inherent, objective justice, it is again an equivocation to compare that to our own attempts to make things "seem fair". Objective facts don't have to conform to any of our ideas about how they should work. Again, if there was such a thing as objective justice and we could somehow find out what it is, we wouldn't care. It would be meaningless. If it didn't happen to "seem fair" to us, we'd ignore it; same with morality. It's the reasoning behind these things that gives them weight.

My question remains: what is a moral fact supposed to tell me? Without such a definition, it's a meaningless term, and I can't even properly comment on it.

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PS: I've realized you're replying to some of my earlier comments piecemeal, so sorry if I've got ahead of myself!