Does anyone own "The Moral Landscape"?

[robvalue]

I think Rob is at his wits end because he thinks I'm saying something that I'm not.

Rob, you are making a bunch of excellent arguments for moral skepticism. I see exactly where you are coming from, man. And the thing is: it's not exactly clear if morality really is objective or not. If the matter was settled, there wouldn't be a branch of philosophy called metaethics.

It is rather exiting, isn't it, to be part of a debate which isn't remotely settled yet?... to know that actually one of us is wrong and the other is right. But not know which one? That's why I like to have this particular debate, btw. Intellectual gymnastics!

But I think you are getting hung up on what it means for morality to be objective or not. Well... let's ask then:

What does it mean for morality to be objective?

It means that it's like math. Math is objective. That doesn't mean "now everyone needs to be concerned with math in their lives because it's objective." Some people hate math. They may choose to live a life without using any math whatsoever. Fine. Let them. But it still remains that math is objective by its very nature. The answer to a division problem has nothing to do with someone's opinions or feelings about division. In the same way, the moral objectivist is saying that something's rightness or wrongness is purely a matter of logic and has nothing to do with personal/cultural feelings.

That's it: the moral objectivist says that morality is objective. This is to say: it has nothing to do with any cultural prejudices or personal feelings. That's it. That's the whole she-bang.

Just because morality is objective doesn't mean anyone should care about it more than they did before. Maybe you hate morality and you think it's stupid and useless. Fine. But (according to the objectivist) it's still objective, regardless of your feelings about it. You might hate math and say that the best culture in the world is the one that shuns math entirely. Fine. But math is still objective, regardless of your feelings about it.

I hope this helps.

Thanks very much for your responses

When it comes to talking about truth, it's an immense subject that I could say a huge amount on. I’m not really sure where to start so as to make it relevant for this topic.

If we assume for simplicity that we have sufficient language available to make a coherent factual statement about reality, one that may be true or false, then I think it’s reasonable to assume that the truth value is objective. This is after making a whole load of other assumptions which probably aren’t going to matter here. From the point of view of this debate, I feel this is sufficient, since my objections aren’t concerned with this.

But moral statements aren’t making factual statements about reality. They are making value judgements about actions taken. Since you bring up maths, I’ll try and use this as an analogy. A mathematical system is objective, once it is properly defined. Whatever we feed into it, we get a certain thing out, which is not subject to opinion. However, there are many mathematical systems. To just refer to all of them as "maths", without saying what system you’re actually using, isn’t sufficient.

Similarly, there are loads of moral systems. There isn’t just "morality". Each one of these can be objective in itself, I have no problem with that. But the idea of "objective morality" requires the description of a single moral system. Which one are we talking about?

There is only one possible way in which I can try to marry up what we're both saying here, and it would go something like this:

There is a morality function M, which is somehow intrinsic to reality itself. It is the "real morality". It produces a value for any particular action A. Thus M(A) is objective. The range of M is from -1 to 1, let’s say, where -1 is the deepest immorality and 1 is the greatest morality.

Before I continue, is this a reasonable interpretation of your position?