Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[robvalue]

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It wasn't a comment on whether morals exist or not.

Yeah. I see that now. lol. Your original post didn't weigh in on the existence of objective morality. It was a commentary on people's desire for it.

If you are feeling so inclined, forgive my obtuse counter-argument to the claim you never made.

I was pretty invested in an argument that started earlier in the thread (before you chimed in), and you popped in to give your two cents when I was trying to (on the surface) prove moral objectivity.

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Also, ROBVALUE: I'm forcing you to take a position as a moral skeptic. I've taken a position ("There are moral facts.") Now YOU need to take a position on what exactly you think "moral facts" are. Otherwise, we can't have a fair debate.

I'm trying really hard here, I'm honestly not meaning to be difficult. We have a severe impasse, with each of us confounded by the position of the other.

I'm saying that moral statements don't mean anything until you are specific about what morality is, and what it is trying to achieve. You can have a "moral fact" once you have stated one of these goals. But to say you can have a fact that just applies to "morality", and is true whatever morality might mean to you, makes absolutely no sense to me. How can it apply to everything?

I guess that's my definition of a "moral fact": a statement that something is "good" or "bad", without establishing what "good" or "bad" are. That appears to be what you're saying, unless I misunderstand. So it's a meaningless statement. It's saying that something is X, where X is yet to be defined. It's literally saying nothing. Something can be good by one definition, and not good by another, so there's no universal statement you can make. If we ask different questions about some water in a beaker, we'll get a different answer. You can't assume all moral questions are the same, while allowing the question to then be about anything.

Is there some correct meaning of "good"? That is the only way this could be resolved, as far as I can see. The answer, to me, is that this is meaningless. What does it mean to say that your definition of good is the correct one? Every potential definition is already correct, in that you've assigned meaning. Is there some kind of "goodness" that transcends every definition of good? Clearly not, unless you've already set some parameters about what "good" can possibly mean. I feel like you're implying all kinds of "good" somehow overlap.

I don't think this is anything to do with science, this is to do with the use of language. You can't have a fact about something until you've suitably defined it. I think I've explained my objection as best my can; whether or not it's a standard objection, I don't know. Science deals with the physical, and morals are not physical. They are an abstraction. But I'm not bring science into this, in the first place.

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For example, let's say God thinks torture is "good". A theist might then say that torture is "good", because they think whatever God says is true. But I think "good" is about wellbeing, so torture is "not good". What moral fact can we make here? We can't say torture is "good", or "not good". It is both, depending on the chosen point of view.